Shagufta Anurag and the office that never stops changing

An office is supposed to be finished. The furniture arrives. Someone removes the protective film. A room acquires a name, usually something more inspiring than the meeting that will take place inside it. Then the company changes. A team grows, another moves, and the beautifully settled floor plan begins to look like an answer to an earlier question. Shagufta Anurag has built a career around that awkward gap between a space and the people expected to use it.

Her route runs through three businesses: Space Matrix, the workplace design firm she founded in 2001; Livspace, the home interiors platform she co-founded in 2014; and Saltmine, founded in 2017. Each concerns the physical world. Each also asks how much of the work surrounding design can be made easier to repeat, understand and change. The progression is worth following because the subject stays familiar while the business model moves beneath it.

Space Matrix began in a small Haji Lane office in Singapore. Anurag had moved to the city in 1999 and found herself rebuilding a career she had already started in India. The founding capital was S$5,000. A modest address offers little protection from an ambitious client's expectations; it does, however, give a founder an immediate education in what deserves spending money on.

There is an appealing directness to this beginning. She had trained in architecture and wanted to do design work on her own terms. The company would eventually enter Interior Design magazine's 2011 Top 100 Giants list. Between the rented room and the industry recognition lay the less photogenic business of winning work, delivering it and persuading people to come back. A floor plan may be elegant. A young firm's cash flow rarely is.

The art of letting someone else run the meeting

Anurag's architecture education was at B. M. S. College of Engineering in Bengaluru; her LinkedIn profile lists 1990 to 1994. Her later work would extend well beyond drawing. As founder and managing director of Space Matrix, she was associated with design strategy, quality and the review of the firm's building and interior work across studios in several countries. Design, at that scale, becomes a question of how an organisation makes decisions.

Her marriage to Anurag Srivastava also became a working partnership. They had met in Bengaluru through a mutual connection, and married in 1999 after a long-distance relationship. Their professional strengths were different: she brought ideas and customer relationships; he brought experience in finance, strategy and the processes needed to grow a business. In 2006, he became Space Matrix's chief executive.

The arrangement gave her room to concentrate on design and innovation. It also complicates the familiar founder story in a useful way. Building a company does not oblige its creator to enjoy every job the company produces. Recognising the work another person does well can be as consequential as recognising a market opportunity. It changes who gets to spend the morning thinking, selling, reviewing or hiring.

She described herself in 2015 as someone who enjoyed the energy of an early venture. That preference helps explain why a successful design practice did not exhaust her appetite. A growing firm needs consistency. A founder may still be interested in the question that has no department, no budget and no settled answer. Her partnership provided one way to accommodate both impulses without pretending they were identical.

“She never ceases to surprise me with her ideas.”Anurag Srivastava, 2015

A home you could see before you bought it

Livspace brought a different customer into view. Instead of a corporate workplace team, there was a homeowner trying to imagine a room and then make it real. Anurag's account of the platform in 2015 emphasised discovery, personalisation and delivery: a customer could look through room designs, change colours or materials, and buy the elements needed to produce the chosen result.

The interesting unit was the room. Shopping for a chair is a bounded decision; designing a home means asking whether many decisions will work together. Livspace's early approach linked visual inspiration with products and the work of getting them into place. Its apartment discovery feature offered another bridge, allowing customers to see designs associated with their own apartment layouts before committing to a purchase.

Anurag was working on design and innovation at the company. The role connected her architectural background to a consumer service in which the image on the screen carried a practical promise. A photograph could attract attention. Delivery had to justify it. Seen alongside Space Matrix, Livspace widened the recurring question in her career: how do you carry an idea through all the arrangements required to make it usable?

Her ambitions were not confined to interiors. By 2015 she had also launched the London food technology venture Hao Chii. It is a small but revealing detour in a career often described only through three design businesses. She was willing to entertain another kind of product, another customer and another set of practical complications. Founders collect problems rather as other people collect houseplants, with considerably more paperwork.

The expensive room full of disconnected files

Saltmine returned her attention to the workplace, with software as the product. Its 2021 funding announcement described a platform bringing together workplace strategy, design, pricing and portfolio analysis. The clients named included PG&E, Snowflake and Workday. Those are organisations for which office decisions can span buildings, teams and locations. A drawing is necessary, but a drawing alone cannot settle every question attached to it.

Consider the ordinary questions implicit in that job. How much space will a team need? What changes if hiring accelerates? Can a proposed layout be compared with another without restarting the entire exercise? These are illustrative questions, but they explain the appeal of treating workplace planning as an ongoing activity. The expensive part of an office can include the time spent trying to agree what the office should become.

Saltmine's current product description combines programming, test fitting, visualisation and delivery. A test fit examines how a proposed use could fit within a space. Put those stages closer together and the people making decisions can assess an option before it hardens into a sequence of purchases and construction commitments. Software enters an architectural process at the point where changing one's mind is still useful.

The company's stated ambition is to connect workplace information that would otherwise sit in separate systems. Its capabilities include bringing spatial information together with utilisation and headcount data, comparing scenarios, and supporting collaboration among internal teams and outside consultants. These are product capabilities described by Saltmine, rather than a promise that every workplace will automatically become cheaper or more agreeable. A shared plan still requires people to agree.

Twenty million dollars, and a route to customers

In February 2021, Saltmine announced a US$20 million Series A round involving Jungle Ventures, Xplorer Capital and JLL Spark. At that point, the San Francisco-headquartered business reported more than 125 employees across five offices in Asia, Europe and North America. Those figures belong to that funding announcement. They mark a stage in the business, rather than a running counter of its size today.

The JLL relationship added something beyond investment. JLL agreed to sell Saltmine's software to its own customers. For a company serving corporate real estate teams, access matters: the person who can buy the product may sit inside an organisation with established advisers, approval processes and ways of working. A reseller arrangement provides a route into those conversations. Distribution becomes part of the design of the business.

Saltmine also announced Jim Baum's appointment to its board and Shawn Green's appointment as chief revenue officer. The combination of financing, distribution and leadership appointments points to a specific task: turning a product into an enterprise operation. It is a different kind of work from winning a first interiors commission, though the need to explain value to a customer remains familiar.

Anurag's earlier businesses made her an experienced participant in that conversation. Space Matrix had worked directly on workplaces; Livspace had put design choices into a digital customer journey. Saltmine asks a corporate buyer to use software across decisions that involve both physical space and organisational change. Her career gives that proposition a practical history. The knowledge accumulated in one business becomes material for the next question.

Still making room for the next question

The connection to workplace design remains visible in the businesses she helped establish. Space Matrix's work includes LinkedIn's Bengaluru office, a project described around the experience of the people using it. In 2025, her roles still included managing director of Space Matrix Group and co-founder of Saltmine and Livspace. The later venture has not erased the earlier chapters.

Her public appearances also bring the discussion back to how organisations change. WORKTECH's 2025 Zurich programme promoted her perspective on modernising corporate real estate and using technology to respond to shifting demands. Saltmine subsequently appeared on Forbes Asia's 2026 “100 to Watch” list. Recognition provides a useful date marker, although the quieter task remains helping customers make decisions about places they already occupy.

In her own advice about entrepreneurship, Anurag has put weight on culture, focus and enjoying the work. “Enjoy every moment, have fun and keep it simple,” she said in 2015. The sentence has the advantage of being easy to remember and the disadvantage of being difficult to obey. Simplicity is particularly demanding when the product has to reconcile a building, a budget and several people's plans for the future.

There is one pleasingly concrete aspiration in her earlier interviews. In 2015, she wanted to own an auto-rickshaw, her favourite form of transport. It is an unexpected object in a career populated by corporate offices and online platforms: small, mobile and quite untroubled by the need for a conference room. The ambition belongs to that moment, and supplies a human detail no funding total can improve.

Look across her work and the recurring interest is how an idea survives contact with everyday use. A room has to be furnished. A design practice has to be managed. An enterprise platform has to fit the organisation buying it. Anurag has kept moving among those problems, carrying a designer's concern for the finished experience into the machinery that produces it. The office will change again. She has made a business of expecting it to.