Vajid Jafri
Built Eight Companies
Before Anyone Was Watching

In 1990, when most of America was still figuring out fax machines, Vajid Jafri was installing kiosk machines that dispensed airline tickets and event passes on demand - no agent, no counter, no line. It didn't make him famous. It made him addicted to a question that still drives everything he does: what would travel look like if you removed every unnecessary person standing between the traveler and the seat?

Thirty-six years later, Jafri runs myRiva - formerly Onriva - a Foster City, California-based business travel marketplace that connects 3,500+ small and medium-sized companies to more than 2 million global travel suppliers, moving north of $3 billion in annual purchasing volume through a platform that most of the industry still hasn't quite caught up to. The company rebranded in 2024. The mission hasn't changed since 2016.

Jafri earned a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, Pakistan. He then crossed the Pacific and landed at Stanford for a Master of Science in Engineering. Civil engineering trains you to think in structures: load-bearing walls, tension, redundancy, what fails first under pressure. It turns out that's also a decent way to think about the architecture of a travel marketplace. He never built a bridge. He built something harder to spec.

What followed Stanford was a career that reads like a one-man proof-of-concept for the entire travel tech industry. At Docunet in 1990, he developed that first airline ATM. In 2000, he launched Excambria, getting non-public inventory to travel agencies that the open web never showed. In 2005 he founded cFares, a metasearch engine that stitched together web fares and consolidator pricing into a single view - a concept that Kayak and Google Flights would later bring to mass market. In 2011 he co-founded Mondee, the travel consolidator platform that grew fast enough that Jafri would eventually step away to start something larger.

Eight companies in 25+ years. Not a portfolio. A curriculum.

Onriva launched in 2016. For the next five years, it operated in near-total stealth. No press tours. No panels. No breathless TechCrunch announcements. Jafri was building. When he finally surfaced at the Phocuswright Conference in late 2021, he described a "model of abundance" in business travel content - a marketplace approach where the traveler, not the travel manager or the OTA, sits at the center. The industry leaned in. Three thousand five hundred companies signed up.

The product Jafri built sits at a specific intersection: AI-native, direct-supplier, loyalty-preserving. Most corporate travel platforms treat loyalty points like a secondary consideration - something employees can maybe use someday, if they remember to claim them. myRiva's architecture is built around the premise that travelers keep their points, their perks, their status. The platform connects to airlines, hotels, and car rentals directly, without the layers of GDS markup and agency commission that add cost and remove transparency. It's a simpler model that turns out to be genuinely hard to build.

The company carries 12 patents across direct supplier integration and AI/ML-driven travel automation. It runs conversational voice technologies alongside the standard booking flows. The tech stack - Salesforce, AWS, Pardot, New Relic, Liferay - is lean but enterprise-ready. Sixty-six people serve a platform that processes travel volume for businesses collectively representing more than $3 billion in annual spend. That ratio doesn't happen by accident.

The mentor who shaped Jafri's thinking wasn't a Silicon Valley icon. It was Freddie Laker - the British airline pioneer who launched low-cost transatlantic travel in the 1970s before being crushed by the major carriers. Jafri describes Laker as a "soulmate" in business philosophy. The early warning Laker gave about industry power dynamics proved real: Jafri lost an early TWA deal in a way that validated every concern about how incumbents protect themselves. He learned the lesson without flinching, and built around it.

He also credits a former CFO from CBS and Capitol Records with teaching him to think big - not just slightly bigger, but categorically bigger. "Knowing your limits and knowing when to lean into partners" is how he phrases the other side of that lesson. myRiva's 2026 partnership strategy suggests he means it: ATPCO Routehappy integration lets travelers take virtual 3D tours of plane cabins before booking their seat. A Mesh Payments integration collapsed the traditional gap between booking a flight and expensing it. DerbySoft brought live hotel rates from major global chains with real-time loyalty logic. Three partnerships in eight weeks. Each one plugging a gap that competitors still paper over with customer service calls.

The 2024 rebrand from Onriva to myRiva wasn't cosmetic. It tracked a real shift in how the company wanted to present itself: less corporate infrastructure, more personal marketplace. The "my" isn't just branding - it's a positioning claim that the platform belongs to the traveler, not the procurement department. For companies whose employees are booking 200 trips a year, that's not a small thing.

In the first half of 2025, myRiva matched all of its prior full-year business volume. The company is on track for 100% year-over-year growth. With $60 million raised from investors including Evolution VC Partners and Sarona Holdings, and a 66-person team spread across three continents, Jafri is running the largest and most-capitalized bet of his career. He's done this seven times before at smaller scale. The question isn't whether he knows how to build. The question is how long before the rest of the industry realizes what he's built.

The operations contact for myRiva remains at 1065 East Hillsdale Boulevard, Suite 215, Foster City, California 94404. The company can be reached at +1 866-317-1302. For a civil engineer who once built ticket-dispensing machines in an era of dial-up modems, the next phase of myRiva's infrastructure - virtual cabin tours, unified T&E workflows, direct hotel loyalty integrations - looks less like a startup's ambition and more like a blueprint long overdue for construction.