Co-founder and CEO, Thrillophilia | Founded 2009 | Bengaluru
In the late 2000s, two young software professionals in Bengaluru spent their weekends doing what many people their age did. They went trekking, rafting, paragliding and exploring Karnataka. And they kept running into the same problem: it was hard to decide where to go, and harder still to find someone reliable to take them there.
Chitra Gurnani and Abhishek Daga turned that problem into a company. They did it slowly, with their own money, and without giving up their jobs until the business could stand on its own. Thrillophilia, the company they started in 2009, now says it has taken more than 30 lakh travellers on trips, and that it earns over ₹500 crore a year.
Weekends in Karnataka
Before Thrillophilia, Chitra worked as a software engineer at Infosys and SAP Labs. Abhishek worked in digital marketing, and had helped companies such as Biocon, Flying Machine and Discovery Channel build their online presence, according to a 2013 profile on iSPIRT’s Product Nation.
The two shared a love of the outdoors. Chitra’s weekend travels, Skift reported in 2025, showed her how few unique, offbeat experiences were easy to find in India. India had no shortage of adventure: rivers to raft, hills to climb, forests to explore. What it lacked was a way to find those experiences and trust the people who ran them. The market was fragmented, and most operators were small and hard to reach online.
A blog, a side project, five friends
Thrillophilia began as a blog in 2009, with notes on what to do and where, based on the couple’s own trips. The company was registered in Jaipur in April 2009, according to company filings, and the website formally launched that August.
In those first months it was a group effort. When YourStory profiled the young company in August 2009, it listed five partners: Abhishek Daga, Chitra Gurnani, Abhishek Tripathi, Sanket Tondare and Vikram Arora, described as friends who did not want conventional nine-to-five careers. Operations ran from a Bengaluru office, with a small team in Jaipur supporting the back end. There were five partners and two employees. “It is a self funded organization,” Abhishek told YourStory.
The site offered rafting, camel safaris, treks, scuba diving, caving, wildlife tours and paragliding across India, along with an “Adventure Bible” of more than 500 destinations, shared free. Over time, Chitra and Abhishek became the two founders most closely identified with the company. By 2013, YourStory was describing them as a husband-and-wife team.
Savings first, salaries later
Thrillophilia was built on savings. The founders put in their own money, YourStory reported in 2013, and did not chase investors. By 2010 the blog had become a side project with a small sales team, and early business came from companies looking for offbeat team outings.
For its first couple of years, Thrillophilia was something the founders built alongside their jobs. Chitra then went to the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, and graduated with an MBA in 2011. After ISB, she ran Thrillophilia full-time, YourStory reported, while Abhishek stayed in his corporate job until the company was profitable enough to pay salaries.
The company reached break-even in 2011, according to Product Nation, and the same year raised a small undisclosed seed investment from a US-based investor.
A prize, an angel round, and a lesson
Thrillophilia did not go looking for investors in its early years. In 2012 it won a place at BizQuest, a contest run by TiE and ISB, whose prize was a chance to pitch for ₹1 crore of investment. That drew the attention of angel networks.
In September 2013, Thrillophilia raised about $200,000 from Hyderabad Angels, iLabs Venture Capital Fund, Navlok Ventures and IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship, Inc42 and YourStory reported. Chitra, by then CEO, was clear about how much the founders wanted to give away. “We won’t raise another angel round so as to not dilute too much of our stake,” she told YourStory.
By then the company had about 30 people, was serving close to 2,200 customers a month, and listed more than 400 tours and 1,000 experiences across 72 cities. It had also moved towards a marketplace model, where approved local operators could list their own trips after Thrillophilia’s ground team checked them.
Not everything went smoothly. Abhishek wrote in 2013 that search engines had once driven about 80% of the site’s traffic, until a Google penalty linked to artificial link building cut that traffic to a tenth. He also wrote that the company had spent around ₹2 crore on Facebook advertising over four years.
Recognition came alongside the struggle. By 2013 Thrillophilia had won the Manthan South East Asia award for e-travel and tourism and IIM Ahmedabad’s Power of Ideas, and the company had been featured on CNBC’s Young Turks and CNN-IBN’s Going Solo, Inc42 reported.
The years without big money
Thrillophilia grew in a market where rivals raised large venture rounds. It did not. According to Skift, it never raised a traditional Series A, and came close to shutting down twice. The lack of abundant capital, Chitra told Skift, “became a blessing in disguise.”
A 2024 profile in The Week reported that the company raised about $1.2 million across 2013 and 2015, that an attempt to raise money from at least 50 investors in 2017 and 2018 failed, and that the founders later bought back their investors’ shares.
The company turned profitable in 2017, Skift reported, and stayed profitable in every year since except 2020 and 2021, when Covid stopped travel.
Covid, and a new kind of trip
The pandemic shut borders and grounded flights. Day trips and single activities, the core of Thrillophilia’s business, simply stopped.
The founders used the pause to rethink what they sold. In 2021 they launched 53 Takeoffs, a travel company built around personalised multi-day tours rather than one-off experiences, sold through Thrillophilia, according to The Week. The shift stuck. “We started with single experiences. Now we deliver entire journeys,” Abhishek said in a 2025 company announcement.
By 2025, Skift reported, Thrillophilia was connecting more than ten lakh travellers a year. “A standout moment was when we reached our first million travelers,” Chitra told Skift.
Where Thrillophilia stands now
Thrillophilia is now headquartered in Jaipur, with offices in Dubai and the United States. In October 2025, the company said its FY24 revenue topped ₹500 crore, up 40% from the year before, BW Hotelier reported. It said it had more than 700 employees, and opened a new office in Gurugram to support its growth. Its website says it operated more than 1,25,000 trips in 2025, and more than 30 lakh travellers in total.
The company now leans heavily on artificial intelligence, using it to draft itineraries, check whether trips are feasible and handle first customer calls, while human advisers manage complex, high-value journeys.
In April 2026, Chitra received the Entrepreneur of the Year award for travel at the Economic Times Entrepreneur Awards. She has also been recognised by the Ministry of External Affairs for her work in travel.
Seventeen years after a blog about weekend trips, Chitra still leads Thrillophilia as CEO, with Abhishek alongside her as co-founder.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: YourStory (August 2009, August 2013, September 2013); Inc42 (September 2013); iSPIRT Product Nation (April 2013, August 2013); The Week (March 2024); Skift (March 2025); BW Hotelier (October 2025); Business Standard/ANI (April 2026); GMAC (February 2023); Tofler company filings; Thrillophilia (company website).
