Sabina Chopra co-founded Yatra when most Indians had never booked a flight on the internet

In 2006, most Indians had never bought a flight ticket on the internet. Air travel was largely a counter business. Hotels were booked over the phone. Holiday packages came from a neighbourhood travel agent who knew your name and your parents’ names. That same year, Sabina Chopra, with her co-founders Dhruv Shringi and Manish Amin, launched Yatra.com. Two decades later, Yatra trades on Indian stock exchanges and Nasdaq, and online travel in India is no longer a frontier idea but a category most adult consumers use without thinking.

A travel executive going home

Before Yatra, Sabina Chopra had built a serious career in the international travel industry. She had spent roughly a decade at Japan Airlines before joining eBookers in the early online-travel era, with responsibility across multiple European and global markets. By her own public account, she had spent more than a decade watching the online-travel category mature in Europe and the US.

When she returned to India in the mid-2000s, the timing was unusually good. Broadband penetration was beginning to grow, a generation of working professionals had credit cards, and air travel was being deregulated at scale. The category that had taken decades to mature in the West could plausibly accelerate here.

Yatra: an early, full-stack online travel agent

Yatra launched as a full-stack OTA, flights, hotels, buses, holidays, corporate travel, rather than as a narrow vertical play. That breadth was a deliberate decision. India did not have the depth of category players that older markets had, and a single trustworthy travel destination on the internet had real consumer pull.

Over the years, Yatra layered a strong corporate travel business onto the consumer offering. By the late 2010s, Yatra was widely reported to be one of the largest corporate travel platforms in India, with relationships across multinational and Indian enterprises. That corporate book ultimately became a key part of the investment story for both the Nasdaq listing and the later domestic IPO.

Listing twice, on two continents

In 2016, Yatra Online completed a merger with a SPAC, Terrapin 3 Acquisition Corp., and began trading on Nasdaq, an unusual move for an Indian consumer internet company at the time. Years later, the company went on to list on the Indian stock exchanges as well, consolidating its presence as a publicly traded, dual-market company.

For Sabina Chopra personally, the listings closed a long arc that began in a market where the average Indian had never bought a flight online to one where consumer travel was almost entirely digital.

The quiet co-founder pattern

Indian consumer-tech storytelling often defaults to the single-CEO narrative, even when the underlying company was built by a balanced founding team. Yatra has been unusually well-served by being talked about as a three-founder story, Chopra, Shringi and Amin.

Chopra has long been spoken of within the Yatra team as the founder running the operational depth of the business, supply, corporate accounts, customer experience, rather than the public face. That pattern is increasingly common in mature companies but remains under-reported when one of the operating co-founders is a woman.

“You do not have to be the loudest founder in the room. You do have to be the one the team can rely on.”

What founders can take from the Yatra story

Yatra is a good case study in two things. The first is the payoff of being early in a category that the broader economy is about to push behind you. Online travel in India had a structural tailwind, air travel deregulation, rising incomes, smartphone penetration, and the founders chose to start when those forces were beginning to align.

The second is the value of a co-founder model that lets different operators run different parts of the company. Companies in capital-heavy, operationally complex industries, travel, logistics, fintech, tend to benefit from teams of equally credible operators, rather than one founder doing everything.

The dual-listing decision

Yatra is one of the few Indian consumer-internet companies to have been publicly traded on both the US (Nasdaq, via the 2016 SPAC merger with Terrapin 3) and Indian (BSE/NSE, in the years since) public markets. Dual listings carry real cost, two sets of disclosures, two regulators, two investor bases with different appetites, and most Indian consumer companies have not chosen that path. The fact that Yatra did is a reminder that the public-markets question is not either/or, and that an Indian operating company can plausibly access global capital pools if the corporate structure and the disclosure muscle are built for it.

Frequently asked questions about Sabina Chopra

Who founded Yatra?

Yatra was co-founded in 2006 by Sabina Chopra, Dhruv Shringi and Manish Amin. All three came from senior leadership backgrounds in international travel. Sabina had spent roughly a decade at Japan Airlines and then at eBookers in the early online-travel era. The three-founder structure is unusual to call out because Yatra has historically been reported on as a more balanced founding team than the typical single-CEO Indian consumer-tech narrative, with each founder running different operational depth.

Is Yatra publicly listed?

Yes, on two exchanges. Yatra Online first listed on Nasdaq in 2016 via a merger with the SPAC Terrapin 3 Acquisition Corp, an unusual route for an Indian consumer-internet company at the time. Years later, the company went on to list on Indian stock exchanges as well. That makes Yatra one of the few Indian consumer companies that has been publicly traded on both Indian and US capital markets at different stages.

What does Yatra do, in business terms?

Yatra operates as a full-stack online travel agent, flights, hotels, buses, holidays and corporate travel, rather than as a vertical-only player. The most strategically important part of the business has, over time, become its corporate travel arm: Yatra is widely reported to be one of the largest corporate travel platforms in India, with relationships across Indian and multinational enterprises. That corporate book is part of what made both the Nasdaq and Indian listings credible to public-market investors.

Why is this a useful case study in timing?

Yatra launched at a moment when several macro forces were beginning to align in India, air-travel deregulation, growing broadband, more credit cards, more frequent business travel. The category had taken decades to mature in Europe and the US; the founders bet that India would compress the curve. Two decades later, online travel in India is no longer a frontier idea but a default consumer behaviour, and Yatra is one of the small handful of companies that built the rails for that shift.

What is Sabina Chopra’s net worth?

There is no net-worth figure for Sabina Chopra from a reputable, independently-verifiable source. Yatra Online is a listed company, but it does not disclose her personal holding and no credible personal net-worth figure is publicly reported. The numbers that appear on celebrity or “net worth” aggregator sites are unsourced and inconsistent, so, in line with our editorial policy,