Summary

• Mauji is India’s first pay-by-the-hour time cafe, generating around Rs 2 crore in annual revenue across three outlets.
• Founder Vandita Purohit built Mauji after three earlier ventures involving partner fallouts and business pivots.
• The cafe runs on a BYOF, QR-code-based, cashless model with pricing starting at Rs 210 per hour.

Most cafe stories start with a menu. Vandita Purohit’s starts with a spreadsheet of things that didn’t work.

By the time she opened Mauji Time Cafe in Pune in 2020, she had already run an IT consulting firm, a co-working space, and a travel startup, and stepped away from two of them under difficult circumstances. Mauji isn’t her first business. It’s her fourth.

That matters, because Mauji’s core idea, charging guests for the hours they spend rather than what they order, sounds like a gimmick until you see it as the product of someone who has spent over a decade figuring out what people actually want from a shared space, and what founders get wrong along the way.

From IT Consulting to Cafes: How Vandita Purohit Got Here

Purohit is from Nagpur and studied Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering at Nagpur University, graduating in 2008. She started her first venture at 22, with no mentors and no prior business experience to lean on.

In 2009, she co-founded Mint Tree, an IT sales and business development consulting firm, with her husband. In 2014, a major client project ended after a partner fallout. Instead of shutting down, the couple pivoted to a software services startup using profits from their remaining US client work.

That bet didn’t pay off either. Losses forced them to vacate their Pune office, lay off staff, and rebuild with a smaller team.

“One of the biggest lessons I learned was knowing when to stop. Continuing to pour resources into an unsustainable business only makes it harder to move forward,” Purohit says.

In 2015, after a startup bootcamp in San Francisco, she co-founded The Daftar, a co-working space in Pune. It gained real traction, but by 2020 she stepped away from running it day to day over differences in vision with her partners.

“The biggest lessons from Daftar were to choose partners carefully, scale at a sustainable pace, and build a business that can withstand challenges. I carried those learnings with me while launching Mauji,” she says.

In between, in 2018, she also launched TraWork, a startup built around letting professionals work while travelling, years before “workations” became an industry buzzword.

The Idea Behind Mauji: Paying for Time, Not Food

Running a co-working space taught Purohit something specific: a lot of people leave home not to eat or drink, but simply to work, meet someone, or sit somewhere comfortable. Traditional cafes weren’t built for that. You were expected to order something to justify the table.

Mauji was originally meant to be an extension of TraWork, a travel-themed cafe that would double as TraWork’s office and a small travel store. While researching the idea, Purohit came across the concept of “third spaces”, places outside home and work where people gather without an agenda. That research, and backing from an investor, became the shape Mauji eventually took: a pay-by-the-hour time cafe.

“Having worked in the co-working sector, I realised there was a need for spaces where people could spend time without being expected to order food or drinks. That’s what inspired me to launch Mauji as a time cafe, where people pay for the time they spend and are free to use the space however they like,” Purohit says.

Read more: College Student Turns Down IIM MBA to Build ₹2 Crore Bakery Startup

Building Mauji Through a Lockdown

Purohit took possession of a 6,000-square-foot bungalow in Pune’s Bhosale Nagar on March 14, 2020, just days before the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown stopped construction entirely.

With support from her investor and landlord, she kept building in phases through the lockdown, designing the interiors herself and putting in roughly Rs 80-90 lakh to set up the first cafe.

“The cafe was ready by September 2020, but we could only open in October after the restrictions were relaxed. In the beginning, almost all our customers came through word of mouth and social media. As things gradually returned to normal, we officially launched Mauji in December 2020,” she says.

How Mauji Actually Works

Mauji runs as India’s first and largest time cafe and anti-cafe, a model with roots in the Russian anti-cafe concept, where the bill is based on time spent, not items ordered.

Guests get unlimited complimentary beverages, a self-serve DIY snack bar, and high-speed WiFi for the duration of their billed time. The cafe also operates on a BYOF (Bring Your Own Food) model, so people can bring home-cooked meals or order in through Zomato or Swiggy without any restriction.

Checking in and out happens through a QR code scan, keeping the experience largely cashless.

Current pricing:

• Time Cafe: starts at Rs 210/hour (unlimited beverages, snacks, WiFi included)
• Event Space: starts at Rs 1,500/hour
• Studio Space: starts at Rs 1,500/hour
• Monthly Co-working Membership: starts at Rs 10,000/month

Beyond the cafe itself, Mauji houses a co-working section for freelancers and small teams, a content studio for photographers and podcasters, flexible event spaces used for flea markets and workshops, a community library, a maker space for pottery and prototyping, and an in-house art store for local creators.

Read More: Anjali Sardana Pronto: 23-Year-Old Builds $100M Startup in a Year

Where Mauji Operates Today

Mauji currently runs three cafes across two cities. The flagship, in Bhosale Nagar, Pune, occupies a 6,000-square-foot, 40-year-old bungalow and can hold up to 150 people, including 55 dedicated co-working seats.

In Nagpur, Mauji operates two smaller cafes, in New Colony and Laxmi Nagar, each around 1,800 square feet with roughly 60 seats.

Across all three locations, the team runs between 400 and 500 events a year, averaging at least eight on a typical weekend. Mauji employs a team of 32 people, spanning community managers, baristas, kitchen staff, and finance and legal roles.

Nearly half of Mauji’s customers are repeat visitors, according to the company, and the business currently generates annual revenue of around Rs 2 crore.

Startup INDIAX Take

Mauji’s real story isn’t the pay-by-the-hour hook, it’s what got Purohit there. Three ventures either failed or ended in a partner exit before Mauji found its footing, and each one left her with a specific operating lesson: know when to stop, choose partners carefully, scale at a pace the business can sustain.

For Indian founders, especially first-timers without mentors or family capital to fall back on, that sequencing is the more useful takeaway than the cafe concept itself. Mauji also shows a pattern worth watching in India’s hospitality and co-working space: niche, community-first formats built by founders who already understand the operational cracks in the category they’re entering, rather than newcomers building from a generic playbook.

Why This Matters

India’s co-working and cafe categories are both crowded and, in many cases, undifferentiated. Mauji’s time-based pricing model is a genuine structural difference, not just a marketing angle, because it changes the unit economics of running a cafe. Instead of relying on food and beverage margins, revenue is tied directly to occupied hours and space utilisation.

For consumers, particularly freelancers, students, and small teams without dedicated office access, it offers a lower-commitment alternative to formal co-working memberships. For founders in adjacent categories, hospitality, co-working, community spaces, it’s a reminder that pricing models themselves can be the differentiator, not just design or location.

The Bigger Picture

India’s “third space” category, cafes, co-working hubs, and community spaces built around presence rather than consumption, is still small but growing, particularly in tier-1 and tier-2 cities with large freelance and remote-work populations. Mauji’s anti-cafe model borrows from an established international format but adapts it with Indian pricing and a BYOF policy that most Western anti-cafes don’t offer.

Purohit has previously spoken about wanting to expand Mauji beyond Pune and Nagpur, with cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Hyderabad on her radar as part of a larger vision to build a hospitality group around the “third space” concept. Whether that expansion happens will likely depend on how well the per-hour model holds up outside its home markets, where real estate costs and customer habits differ meaningfully from Pune and Nagpur.

Know a founder building an unconventional business model in India? Tell us about them in the comments, or explore more founder stories on Startup INDIAX.

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