The mundane villain in Mayank Kukreja's story is an office process. To book a holiday, a traveler could open an app, compare options and finish in minutes. To book a trip for work, that same person might email a travel desk, wait for a reply, negotiate an approval, save a stack of receipts and come home to an expense report. Consumer software had sprinted ahead. Corporate travel was still looking for the right attachment.
Kukreja knew the gap from both seats. At McKinsey, he traveled nearly 200 days a year and saw the friction as an employee. On client work, he also saw travel and expense as a stubborn cost line that companies wanted to control. The traveler wanted freedom and speed. Finance wanted policy, evidence and predictability. Traditional systems often made each side experience the other as the problem.
That tension would become ITILITE, the company Kukreja started with Anish Khadiya in 2017. Its early proposition had a bit of game theory tucked inside a booking tool: if a company permitted an $8,000 hotel and an employee voluntarily chose one for $4,000, why not share part of the saving? The policy stopped being only a ceiling. It became an invitation to participate.
A career assembled like a toolkit
The route to that idea was deliberate, though not straight. Kukreja studied computer science at IIT Delhi from 2003 to 2007. His first job was at Lime Labs, a small technology startup, where building new things planted the desire to start something of his own. He had technical fluency but felt he did not yet know how to run a business. So he went to IIM Ahmedabad, completed its management program and graduated with a gold medal in 2011. A stint as an exchange student at McGill University widened the itinerary.
McKinsey was meant to be a two-year education in how large companies work. It became roughly four years across India and the United States. Consulting offered a view into businesses at scale, but it also moved him sideways from the startup route he had imagined. The lesson was useful precisely because it created the next question: where could he learn to operate inside a technology company moving at speed?
Myntra supplied the answer. Kukreja joined in strategy, planning and product management. Consulting had trained him to analyze incremental change at large organizations. Myntra, he later said, normalized setting a target such as fivefold growth and then organizing around it. It also gave him a network inside India's technology community. The decisive evidence for ITILITE was that a modern internet company still had a broken corporate-travel experience. If the problem survived inside Myntra, it was not confined to old-fashioned employers.
Through all these jobs, Kukreja kept a running list of startup ideas. The habit mattered because it separated entrepreneurial appetite from any single concept. His filter was practical: the problem needed to be large, it should lend itself to technology, and customers needed to admit that the current solution was unsatisfying. Corporate travel passed. Almost every company the founders spoke with had a travel agent or desk that technically worked. Few were happy with it.
“The biggest step before you jump into starting on your own is you need to have absolute conviction.”Mayank Kukreja
The month before the company
A business idea was only half the choice. Kukreja still needed the person with whom to build it. He and Khadiya had similar resumes on paper, including time at McKinsey and Myntra. Friends saw something else: different temperaments and different ways of approaching a problem. One might push aggressively while the other brought calm. One might begin with analysis while the other began with people.
Before they committed, the pair spent about a month talking about what they each wanted over the long term. Kukreja's rule for a co-founder begins before the familiar advice about complementary skills. The first layer is trust and mutual respect. Startup arguments can be loud, personal and exhausting. The useful baseline is a belief that the other person is still trying to do the right thing for the company. Without it, disagreement accumulates interest.
Large, painful and suitable for technology beat fashionable and vague.
Align on the destination before admiring complementary resumes.
Give employees a reason to care about company savings.
Build for the behavior that will return, not only the crisis in front of you.
ITILITE began by trying to bring corporate travel online with a corporate-first design. Instead of reproducing a consumer booking site, it narrowed searches to a few personalized options, preserved company controls and added a savings reward. The larger product grew around that behavioral loop: booking, approvals, expense filing, reimbursements, cards, analytics and support. The aim was integration without asking the traveler to become an expert in policy.
A travel company with nowhere to go
Then came a date with almost literary timing. In January 2020, as India reported its first COVID-19 case, Kukreja signed a term sheet for ITILITE's $13 million Series B. Within weeks, movement stopped. Transaction-driven travel revenue fell sharply. Roughly 150 enterprises had signed up before the shutdown, and the category on which the product depended had temporarily disappeared.
The founders decided that companies would travel again, whether the wait lasted six, twelve or twenty-four months. Their financial position gave them room to think beyond immediate survival. They stayed close to customers and continued product work. The pause exposed adjacent problems: rules became more complicated, distributed employees made group movement harder, and a staffed travel desk looked increasingly like a fixed cost attached to an unpredictable workload.
Three months after India's second pandemic wave subsided, ITILITE said its business had returned to pre-pandemic levels. By mid-2022, it reported retaining about 95 percent of the customers it had before the shutdown and adding another 150 after travel reopened. That April, the company announced a $29 million Series C led by Tiger Global and Dharana Capital, with Matrix Partners India and Tenacity Ventures participating.
“We were never thinking of survival or things like that; we were putting our heads down and building.”Mayank Kukreja
From form fields to a sentence
Kukreja's current product argument loops back to the original frustration. Corporate tools have long asked employees to translate an ordinary intention into rigid fields. In June 2026, he presented ITILITE's voice-based AI booking direction: say the trip out loud, let software interpret the intent, and keep company policy working underneath. A traveler can naturally ask for an exit-row seat or a route that avoids a transit visa. A form may never have offered a box for either.
The claim is less about adding a chatbot than changing the interface. Kukreja contrasts a conversational layer pasted beside an old form with voice as the input itself. The distinction fits the company's longer pattern. First, remove the travel-desk email. Then compress the option set. Then connect booking to expense and payment. Finally, let the traveler express the trip in the way people already speak.
His role has changed with the product. On a 2024 podcast, Kukreja discussed the founder's need to let go, delegate and hire people with depth in one area and breadth across others. The founder who once filled product gaps has to become comfortable creating space. His advice is to enter the room ready to learn. Hire people who know more. Ask the basic question anyway. One answer makes you smarter. Another may help the room notice that an assumption has expired.
That posture explains something about the itinerary from IIT Delhi to San Francisco. Kukreja repeatedly moved toward the skill he was missing: business after engineering, scale after business school, speed after consulting, company-building after product leadership. ITILITE is the accumulated result, but it is also another classroom. The travel problem keeps changing, so the software and the founder have to keep changing with it.
The expense report was never a cinematic antagonist. It was small, ordinary and repeated by millions of employees. That is precisely what made it valuable. Kukreja's useful observation was that boring work can hide a serious product when it sits between two groups with competing needs. Make the employee experience easier, preserve the company's control, and give both sides a reason to use the same system. The flight is only one part of the trip. The handoff is the business.