Founder and CEO, JetSetGo | Founded 2014 | New Delhi
Private aviation is a business of big balance sheets. The customers are among the richest people in the country, and for a long time the rooms where deals were made in India were full of older men.
Kanika Tekriwal walked into those rooms in her mid-twenties. She had recently finished treatment for cancer, she had no aircraft, and she had very little money. What she had was an observation: India’s private jets and helicopters spent much of their time sitting on the ground, while people who wanted to fly in them found the process slow, opaque and expensive.
JetSetGo, the company she built on that observation, now reports annual revenue of more than ₹350 crore. This is how it happened.
A helicopter over Bhopal
Kanika grew up in a traditional Marwari business family from Bhopal. Her father ran several businesses, and she spent school holidays in his office. According to Outlook Business, she learned to fill out cheques, use a typewriter and sit in on conversations about finance. Her parents wanted her well educated, and well married into a wealthy family.
Aviation entered her life early. She has said that as a small child she saw a helicopter land near her family’s home in Bhopal (BW Disrupt described it as an emergency landing on the roof), and she grew up wanting to be a pilot. Her parents did not share that dream. “Being a pilot pretty much flew out of the window,” she told Gulf News in 2022.
At seven she was sent to boarding school at The Lawrence School, Lovedale, in Ooty, two years younger than her classmates because she had skipped kindergarten. “I grew up very fast and, more than anything else, it taught me survival,” she told Outlook Business. After Class 9 her parents brought her home to Bhopal, to Jawaharlal Nehru Senior Secondary School.
Learning the trade
In 2006 she went to Mumbai to study visual communication and design at the BD Somani Institute of Art and Fashion Technology, alongside economics. During college she took a part-time job at Indiabulls, which was then setting up an aviation division.
In 2009 she moved to the UK for an MBA at Coventry University. There she worked with Aerospace Resources, an aviation consultancy, dealing with Indian air charter companies. In Britain she saw a thriving charter market, where booking a private plane was a straightforward service. In India, she later said, customers felt that booking a private jet “was like rocket science,” as she told Business Today in 2017.
The diagnosis
She returned to India in 2011, planning to start a company. Then she was diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. Accounts of her age differ slightly: she has said she was 21, and Outlook Business reported 22.
She went through about nine months of chemotherapy, BW Disrupt reported in 2016. On Shark Tank India she later recalled, as reported by Business Today, “I was 21 and 40 doctors told me that you will survive for four months or four days.”
She recovered. She has said the experience made her “fearless,” as CNN reported in 2016, and that it taught her that “life is short and I have to live for myself and do what is important for me,” as she told Vogue India in 2022, according to Business Today.
Recovery brought a practical problem too. She told Gulf News that many employers were reluctant to hire her after her illness, and that some recruiters saw her as a liability. Her answer was to stop looking. “I’m not going to ask for a job; I’m going to be somebody who’ll be able to give jobs to others,” she said.
Delhi, and a cancelled first flight
Her parents did not want her to move to Delhi. Outlook Business reported that they worried she was not physically strong enough, and that the city was unsafe. She went anyway, staying at a friend’s house at first. JetSetGo Aviation Services was incorporated in Delhi in November 2014, with Sudheer Perla as co-founder. (Some reports date the start of her venture to 2012; company records and the company itself give 2014.)
The first plan was not to buy planes. Outlook Business reported that she had considered buying aircraft to rent out and dropped the idea as unviable. Instead, JetSetGo began as an online marketplace, an “Uber of the skies,” connecting people who wanted to charter a jet or helicopter with owners whose aircraft were sitting idle.
It began badly. Her first booked flight was cancelled two hours before departure because the aircraft owner pulled out. She told Outlook Business she cried for days, then went back to work.
Being a young woman in the room made things harder. She has recalled a client asking her to fetch coffee, and being told she should open a boutique instead. One customer, CNN reported, asked her, “Are you seriously going to be flying a plane?” She has also said people suggested she take up baking cupcakes.
From middleman to operator
The marketplace model had a weakness. JetSetGo was only an intermediary, so when an owner cancelled or an operator gave poor service, its reputation took the blow. Business Today reported in 2017 that the company changed course and began taking over the operation of planes from owners, many of whom were losing money on them. In exchange for running an aircraft, providing crew, engineers, security and catering, JetSetGo gained the right to charter it out. It made idle planes earn money for their owners, without JetSetGo having to buy them.
“From being a marketplace we became a management company running more planes than airlines,” she told YourStory in 2022.
Outlook Business reported that within eight months she had won a contract to manage 20 planes, and that for the first six months she handled almost every task herself. Business Today reported that an operation JetSetGo took over in December 2015 had been losing about ₹40 crore at the EBITDA level. In the following financial year, JetSetGo posted EBITDA of ₹18.2 crore and a small net profit.
Customers who became investors
For almost a year, money was short. In 2015, YouWeCan Ventures, backed by cricketer Yuvraj Singh, invested. Puneet Dalmia, managing director of Dalmia Bharat and a JetSetGo flyer, followed in December 2015, as Outlook Business reported. The rounds were reported at about $2 million in total. Both investors had first been customers. “We never went out to raise money,” she told Business Today.
The company grew fast. CNN reported 16 aircraft in late 2016. By 2017 Business Today counted 22 managed aircraft, ground handling at 29 airports and 4,691 flying hours in a year. Outlook Business, citing Zauba Corp data, reported revenue rising from about ₹7 crore to ₹50 crore in a year. She was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 lists and the BBC’s 100 Women, and received a National Entrepreneurship Award from the Government of India.
Owning the sky
As demand outran the planes available to manage, JetSetGo began buying aircraft of its own. By 2022 Gulf News reported that it owned about ten jets and managed 28 aircraft for wealthy owners in India and the Middle East, with revenue of around ₹150 crore and some 100,000 flyers across 6,000 flights the previous year. The same year, at 33, she was named the youngest self-made woman on the Kotak Private Banking Hurun Leading Wealthy Women list, with an estimated net worth of ₹420 crore.
The ambitions grew larger. In 2024, BusinessLine reported that JetSetGo planned to raise $900 million through debt, equity and customer funding to add 12 mid-sized jets, with a possible IPO in 2027 or 2028. It also signed agreements with overseas makers of electric vertical take-off aircraft for future air taxis. In February 2026, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Vertical Aerospace for up to 50 Valo eVTOL aircraft. “We are seeing early indicators of demand on specific city pairs and intra city corridors,” she said in the announcement.
Where it stands
According to consolidated filings with the Registrar of Companies, reported in April 2026, JetSetGo’s total revenue for FY25 was ₹352 crore, against ₹350 crore in FY24, and it posted a profit of ₹18.7 crore after a loss of ₹27.8 crore the year before. In early 2026, its fleet included five mid-size Hawker jets and six other aircraft, from large-cabin jets to helicopters.
In December 2025 she was announced as a new judge on Shark Tank India Season 5. She has said she personally put only ₹5,600 of her own money into the company, a claim Business Today reported in July 2026. She is married, and her husband is a Hyderabad-based businessman.
The young woman who was told to open a boutique now runs one of India’s largest private aviation fleets. She started it without a single plane.
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: Outlook Business (December 2018); BW Disrupt (July 2016); CNN Money (November 2016); Business Today (September 2017, April 2024, July 2026); Gulf News (September 2022); YourStory (December 2022); Kotak Private Banking (July 2022); BusinessLine via ch-aviation (April 2024); Vertical Aerospace via Business Wire (February 2026); Deccan Chronicle (December 2025); Startuppedia (April 2026); Tofler company records.
