In conversation with Pranav Trehan, Co-Founder & CEO, Aufside Hospitality
1. What is the larger vision behind Aufside Sports Bars & Cafés, and how aggressively do you plan to scale the format across India?
The larger vision behind Aufside is to build India’s most culturally relevant sports-led hospitality and community brand. We strongly believe sports in India are evolving beyond passive viewership. Today, sports are becoming social experiences — people want atmosphere, energy, food, music, conversations, and a sense of belonging around live sporting moments. That behavioural shift is what inspired Aufside.
We are not simply building sports bars. We are building experience-led social destinations where sports, hospitality, entertainment, and community naturally intersect.
India already has one of the world’s most passionate fan cultures across cricket, football, racquet sports, Formula 1, and emerging global leagues. What has been missing is infrastructure that truly elevates how fans experience those moments together. What also differentiates us is our operating model. The F&B industry’s biggest challenge today is capex-heavy expansion combined with unsustainable fixed rentals. Most hospitality businesses spend enormous amounts on fit-outs, rentals, and customer acquisition before even stabilising operations.
Our model solves that differently. Through strategic partnerships with residential townships, mixed-use developments, and developer ecosystems, we create a strong value-exchange proposition where we help improve leasing velocity, resident engagement, clubhouse activation, and overall asset value perception for developers. Because of that value creation, many of our partnerships operate with minimal or no fixed rentals and significantly lower capex exposure from our side.
That fundamentally changes hospitality economics, allowing us to focus far more aggressively on programming, customer experience, operations, and brand building rather than on dead infrastructure costs. From a scale perspective, the ambition is definitely long term and national in scope, but with a very sharp focus on maintaining experiential quality and community relevance.
2. What are your broader expansion plans for similar destinations across India?
Our expansion strategy is deeply tied to India’s evolving residential and community infrastructure story. We are not looking at isolated high-street expansion alone. Our strongest growth engine comes from integrated township ecosystems, premium residential developments, mixed-use assets, and sports-led communities where hospitality becomes part of everyday life.
Through Aufside Hospitality and our larger ecosystem partnerships, we are actively expanding across both metros and high-growth emerging urban centres. What makes our model unique is our understanding of how to operate within the complexities of residential ecosystems — including HOA and RWA dynamics, CAM strategies, resident engagement behaviour, long-term programming calendars, and developer objectives.
Most restaurant operators understand hospitality. Few people understand residential ecosystems, community-building, and how hospitality directly contributes to real estate value creation. That expertise allows us to create extremely differentiated partnerships with developers while simultaneously building long-term recurring communities around our venues.
3. What trends are you seeing in urban India around demand for premium community and lifestyle infrastructure?
One of the biggest trends we are seeing is the shift toward experience-led and community-led consumption.
Modern Indian consumers today spend far more intentionally on experiences that contribute to lifestyle, wellbeing, social connection, and identity. We are also seeing the rise of “third spaces” destinations beyond home and work where consumers spend meaningful leisure and social time.
Another important shift is the rise of the “everyday athlete.” Sports and movement are increasingly becoming part of everyday lifestyle identity, even for people who are not professional athletes. Consumers no longer want purely transactional venues. They want participation, recurring engagement, familiarity, and a sense of belonging. That is why integrated ecosystems combining sports culture, wellness, entertainment, food, music, nightlife, and community are becoming so relevant in urban India today.
4. How would you define Aufside Hospitality beyond being just a sports bar brand?
Aufside is fundamentally a community infrastructure and experience platform disguised as a hospitality brand. The sports bar is simply the physical format. What we are really building is a recurring engagement ecosystem powered through screenings, social programming, tournaments, music nights, comedy shows, creator collaborations, amateur sports culture, nightlife, and hyperlocal community experiences.
Our programming calendars are one of our biggest differentiators. We constantly activate spaces through live screenings, darts championships, pool tournaments, karaoke nights, DJ nights, comedy events, and community-led IPs. That frequency of engagement creates very high repeat behaviour, emotional attachment, and strong community retention around the brand. Hospitality today cannot survive purely on food. It has to create participation and culture.
5. Aufside positions itself at the intersection of sport, food, community, and culture. How did you arrive at this integrated ecosystem approach?
The integrated ecosystem approach came from deeply observing how people emotionally experience sports today. Sport naturally creates community. It creates conversations, rituals, celebrations, energy, and shared identity. But globally, the strongest sports-led spaces understand that the experience goes far beyond the game itself.
My own background in football and hospitality made that especially clear. During my years working within football ecosystems, I realised fans do not simply consume sports; they emotionally invest in them. They want spaces that authentically reflect that passion.
That insight shaped Aufside’s entire philosophy. Food creates comfort. Music creates energy. Sport creates emotion. Community creates belonging. When all these elements come together authentically, the experience becomes far more powerful than any one category individually.Today, Aufside is designed less like a conventional restaurant and more like a live community platform with food and beverage integrated into it.
That is also why our unit economics work differently. We benefit from extremely high repeat behaviour, built-in communities, strong programming-led engagement, and strategic developer partnerships that significantly reduce traditional hospitality pressures around capex and fixed rentals.
Rapid Fire
- One word to describe Aufside Hospitality?
Experiential
- One hospitality brand you admire globally?
Soho House
- Sports bar or fine dining?
A sports bar with fine dining sensibilities
