Chitra Gurnani Daga built Thrillophilia from savings, and kept it profitable

The default story of an Indian consumer-internet company goes like this: raise a seed round, raise a Series A, subsidise demand to grow fast, raise a larger round on the growth, repeat. Chitra Gurnani Daga built Thrillophilia almost entirely off the other script. In 2009, she and her husband Abhishek Daga left IT-sector jobs and started a travel company with a few lakh rupees of their own savings. More than a decade later, Thrillophilia is one of India’s largest travel-experiences brands, and, unusually for the category, a profitable, largely bootstrapped one.

That combination, consumer travel, woman-led, profitable, and not venture-dependent, is rare enough in India that the company is worth studying not for a dramatic funding headline but for the absence of one.

2009: quitting steady jobs to start a travel company

Chitra Gurnani Daga and Abhishek Daga both came out of the IT industry. The decision they made in 2009 was the kind most people talk themselves out of: leave salaried jobs, with no institutional backing, to start a travel business funded by personal savings. The early Thrillophilia was a small operation built around adventure activities and day-experiences, trekking, rafting, paragliding, weekend trips, the kind of bookings that the Indian travel web was not yet organising well.

Starting with their own money set the company’s character permanently. When the founders’ capital is the company’s capital, every rupee of marketing has to pay back, and the business is forced to find product and channels that work without a subsidy. Thrillophilia’s long-running reputation for capital efficiency traces directly to how it began.

The bootstrapped path, with a brief exception

Thrillophilia is best understood as a bootstrapped company. It did take a small amount of early external capital from angels and investors in the period around 2013 to 2015, but the amounts were modest by venture standards and the company did not become a serial fundraiser. It did not raise large growth rounds, it did not chase a unicorn valuation, and it did not run the multi-year loss-making phase that defines most consumer-internet travel companies.

What it did instead was grow on the back of organic demand. Travel is one of the highest-intent search categories on the internet: people who are planning a trip are actively looking for what to do and where to book. Thrillophilia built deep, content-rich pages around destinations and experiences and converted that intent into bookings, compounding an audience over years rather than buying it in quarters. That is a slower way to build, but it produces a business that owns its demand instead of renting it.

From day-experiences to curated multi-day tours

The strategic move that mattered most was widening the product from one-off activities into curated multi-day tours and holiday packages, a far larger ticket size per booking and a stickier customer relationship. The founders later built out a dedicated multi-day tours business under the name 53Takeoffs, which scaled into one of India’s leading multi-day tour operations, serving hundreds of thousands of travellers a year.

The logic is straightforward. A customer who books a single adventure activity is worth a small margin once; a customer who books a curated week-long itinerary is worth far more, and is far more likely to come back. Moving up the value chain, without abandoning the high-intent experiences traffic that brought people in, is what turned a capital-light activities site into a substantial travel business.

Profitable scale, not headline scale

By the mid-2020s, Thrillophilia was operating at meaningful scale: a revenue base in the hundreds of crores of rupees, a profitable EBITDA, and well over a million travellers served on curated tours across a multi-year window. Those are not the numbers a venture-subsidised company posts on the way to an exit; they are the numbers a durable, owner-operated business posts while staying solvent.

Industry recognition followed the performance rather than the fundraising, including Chitra Gurnani Daga being recognised as a leading travel entrepreneur at a major Indian business-awards platform. The recognition is notable precisely because it did not come with a billion-dollar valuation attached. It came with a profit-and-loss statement.

Why travel was the right category to bootstrap

Not every consumer category can be built without venture subsidy, and it is worth being precise about why travel experiences could. Three structural features of the category made bootstrapping viable. First, intent: people who are planning a trip are among the most commercially motivated users on the internet, they are not being persuaded to want something, they already want it and are searching for how to do it. A business that captures existing intent does not need to manufacture demand with discounts.

Second, content compounds. A well-built page about what to do in a destination does not stop working at the end of a marketing quarter; it keeps attracting travellers for years, and it accumulates. A company that spends a decade building that library owns an asset a newer, better-funded competitor cannot simply buy. Third, the unit economics of an experience or a curated tour are genuinely positive, there is a real margin on a real service, which means growth can be financed out of the business rather than out of an investor’s patience. Put together, these features mean travel rewarded exactly the slow, compounding, capital-light approach Thrillophilia took, and would have punished a burn-led one.

The discipline of not raising

It is easy to romanticise bootstrapping in hindsight. In the moment, the hard part is watching well-funded competitors buy growth you are choosing not to buy, and not flinching. For most of the 2010s, the dominant signal in Indian consumer internet was that fundraising itself was the scoreboard, the size of the round was treated as the measure of the company. Choosing, year after year, not to play that game requires a specific kind of conviction: confidence that durable demand and a positive profit-and-loss statement are worth more than a valuation headline.

That discipline had a concrete payoff that is often glossed over. Because Thrillophilia did not raise large dilutive rounds, the founders retained ownership and control of the company they built. When a bootstrapped business reaches hundreds of crores in revenue with profitable EBITDA, the people who own it are the people who built it, not a cap table of growth investors. For a founder, that is the difference between building a company and building someone else’s asset. It is also, in practice, the difference between being able to make long-horizon decisions and being forced into short-horizon ones to satisfy the next markup.

The husband-and-wife structure, honestly read

Thrillophilia is a co-founded, husband-and-wife company, and it is worth reading that structure honestly rather than sentimentally. Couple-founded consumer businesses are common in India partly because trust and aligned incentives are cheap to establish and expensive to fake, two people who are already committed to the same future can make high-trust decisions fast, which matters enormously in a capital-constrained company that cannot afford coordination failures. The risk, equally, is that the woman in such a pair is publicly defaulted into the junior role regardless of what she actually does.

In Thrillophilia’s case the public record is unambiguous: Chitra Gurnani Daga is the CEO and the company’s primary public face, and the external recognition the company has received in the travel industry has accrued to her in that capacity. For readers of this magazine, that is the relevant data point, not that a couple built a company, but that the woman in the couple is the one running it, in a category and a country where the opposite is usually assumed.

What Indian women founders can take from the Thrillophilia story

Thrillophilia is a counter-example to the belief that a consumer-internet company has to be venture-funded to be big. The company scaled to national relevance while staying profitable and largely off institutional capital, which means the founders kept ownership and control through the entire journey. For a woman founder, who, on average, faces a steeper climb raising venture money in India, a bootstrapped, demand-owned model is not a consolation prize. It can be the stronger position.

The second lesson is about compounding. Thrillophilia did not win by outspending competitors on advertising; it won by building an asset, high-intent travel content and a trusted brand, that got more valuable every year and could not be bought overnight. That is a slower game, and it requires the patience to not raise and not subsidise when everyone around you is doing both.

For Indian women considering a consumer business, the Thrillophilia takeaway is concrete. You can start with your own savings. You can grow on organic demand instead of paid burn. You can move up the value chain from small tickets to large ones. And you can build a company that is significant because it is profitable and independent, not because it announced a big round.

One caveat keeps the lesson honest. Bootstrapping is not a universal prescription; it worked for Thrillophilia because the category, high-intent, content-compounding, positive-margin travel, rewarded patience and punished burn. Founders in categories that genuinely require heavy upfront capital or winner-take-all speed should not read this story as proof that raising is a failure. The transferable principle is narrower and more durable: be clear-eyed about whether your category actually rewards capital or merely tolerates it, and if it rewards compounding instead, treat staying private and profitable as a strategy rather than a fallback. Thrillophilia’s achievement is not that it refused money; it is that it correctly read what its category would reward and had the discipline to act on that read for more than a decade.

Frequently asked questions about Chitra Gurnani Daga and Thrillophilia

Who founded Thrillophilia?

Thrillophilia was co-founded in 2009 by Chitra Gurnani Daga and her husband Abhishek Daga. Chitra is the Co-founder and CEO. The two left IT-sector jobs and started the company with a few lakh rupees of their own savings.

Is Thrillophilia bootstrapped or venture-funded?

Thrillophilia began as a bootstrapped company funded by the founders’ own savings. It raised a small amount of early external capital from angels and investors around 2013 to 2015, but it is best known as a largely bootstrapped, profitable business rather than a heavily venture-funded one.

What does Thrillophilia do?

Thrillophilia is an online travel-experiences and tours platform. It started around adventure activities and day experiences and expanded into curated multi-day tours and holiday packages, becoming one of India’s largest travel-experiences brands by traveller volume.

What is Chitra Gurnani Daga’s background?

Chitra Gurnani Daga worked in the IT industry before entrepreneurship. In 2009 she and her husband Abhishek Daga left their jobs to start Thrillophilia, which she has led as CEO through years of largely bootstrapped, organic growth into a profitable travel business.

What is Chitra Gurnani Daga’s net worth?

There is no net-worth figure for Chitra Gurnani Daga from a reputable, independently-verifiable source. Thrillophilia is privately held and largely bootstrapped (₹500 crore+ revenue reported); no credible personal net-worth figure is on the public record. The numbers that appear on celebrity or “net worth” aggregator sites are unsourced and inconsistent, so, in line with our editorial policy,