How Mayank Kukreja Co-Founder And CEO Of Itilite Raised $18M For Simplifying Business Travel?

With a mission to make business travel a great experience and the world a better place, Mayank Kukreja got together with Anish Khadiya to create ITILITE in 2017.

During his many business trips, Mayank noticed the sad state of affairs on the corporate side of travel that was very disconnected. Planning a trip was an offline and time-consuming process every single time. To him, as a traveler, the system felt broken, and that was not just in India; but also across the US, Canada, Australia, and the Middle East. At the same time, as a consultant with McKinsey, he found many clients struggling to cut down on operational costs with travel as a constant element in this fight. After participating in many client projects that tried to combat business travel challenges, Mayank got to understand how companies think of travel as a spending item and try to control it at a deeper level.

An understanding of businesses’ need to optimize costs along with an overview of the business travel segment led to the birth of ITILITE- a smart platform designed to help reduce the travel expenses of corporates by offering employees rewards for choosing budget-friendly travel options.

An alumnus of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad, Mayank’s experience spans across thirteen years of being associated with technology. It was his first job as a Senior Engineer at Lime Labs (a tech startup) where the idea of building a business and “starting up” struck him. Prior to co-founding ITILITE, Mayank also worked with the likes of McKinsey and Myntra in a senior role involving strategy, operations, sales, product development, and pricing. While Myntra taught him to set bold goals and how to achieve them, McKinsey was the role that helped him understand business travel and its challenges.

Under Mayank’s dynamic guidance, ITILITE aims to become the most loved choice of business travelers that offers a smarter corporate travel solution and completely replaces a travel agent.

In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Mayank says:

“Be the dumbest person in the room” – It is something which helps in multiple ways: Forces you to look for smart and motivated people, and gives you the comfort of asking some very basic questions.

Asking the basic questions is a double win game – worst case, it makes you smarter by getting the answer, and in the best case, it makes everyone rethink their assumptions. 

The team which we have built – our smart and motivated team members who are excitedly working towards a common goal of taking ITILITE to the next level is a strong motivation.

Read on to know more about Mayank Kukreja and his journey.

Please tell me about your personal background, and What motivated you to get started with your company?

Mayank Kukreja: After finishing my engineering & MBA, I found myself at McKinsey, and subsequently at Myntra, one of India’s leading e-commerce companies. The motivation to start ITILITE also came from these experiences.

While with McKinsey, I spent almost 200 days on the road, for work, during that period, I had very close encounters with most of the problems in the process of business travel management. Coincidentally, my Cofounder, Anish Khadiya, was also experiencing the same issues. We found the common connection in our determination to find a way to change things for the better.

Myntra’s philosophy of leveraging technology to deliver true value to the end customer was one of the major points of our inspiration as well. The travel market has many options for travelers, but business travel has not been streamlined enough to make it a great experience. Where technology can deliver such minutely intuitive experiences to the end consumer, there is no excuse for the business travel industry to be still running on legacy processes.

What is your current main product, and can you share any previous product pivot story to the current product?

Mayank Kukreja: So we started the company with a single aim – To make business Itineraries LITE – Hence, ITILITE, for the companies, their travel and finance teams, and their employees. ITILITE offers an AI-powered platform to help companies manage their end-to-end business travel process. The platform provides a 90 second seamless booking experience to travelers while assisting companies to save up to 30% in travel budget through superior controls and employee incentivization.

ITILITE’s smart platform today can support finance teams with everything from cost control measures to audits and tax invoice collection. The travel management teams with accurate, seamless employee tracking and management and on-demand reporting. We also ensure that the employees gain from making smarter travel decisions through our in-built incentivization feature. By creating a win-win situation for employees and companies, we not only encourage them to make better choices but also bring in a behavioral shift towards saving for the organization.

How much money have you raised in total so far? When was the recent funding round? 

Mayank Kukreja: To date, our total funding is approximately $18 million across 3 rounds.

The last round of funding came through, interestingly, after the lockdown was in effect in India! Our Series B round of $13 million was led by Greenoaks Capital and Vy Capital, with participation from Matrix Partners India and other existing investors.

With each round, our focus has been on improving our product and expanding our reach. Our current future roadmap includes amping up on safety, seamlessness, and exploring new markets.

How have you attracted users, and with what strategy have you grown your company from the start to now?

Mayank Kukreja: From the early days, our strategy has always been to be customer first in everything we do. It started with doing great work and letting the ITILITE impact be invaluable to our customers. As we grew, our customers had the absolute trust in our impact that drove us faster and higher. We realized that this was a great standard to set for ourselves – Are we listening to the customer’s problems? Being a customer-first company turns them into our brand champions, and it continues to fuel our growth. 

Especially during the pandemic and resultant crisis, this standard has served us well. We have worked on listening to what the audience’s concerns are, finding out what can be done to resolve or discuss them, and doing our best to deliver – whether that’s through our platform or through ecosystem activities like whitepapers or events and webinars.

Which has been the best marketing software tool for the growth of your startup, and why? 

Mayank Kukreja: We have used different software to support our marketing teams, from MailChimp and platforms like LinkedIn to reach and speak to specifically focused audiences, to HubSpot for making our sales and marketing processes smarter, more intuitive, and efficient.

What do most startups get wrong about marketing in general?

Mayank Kukreja: Many product companies tend to make the same mistake – we build our marketing engine too late and then find ourselves doing everything at once. Delivering a great product is #1, but you must start building a brand from Day 1. We learned that brand building is useless without one key pillar: Everything MUST come back to your customers.

Further, not only for startups, this is a mistake made by many brands across the board. You see companies making big statements that are not backed up by substance. Often the glamorous marketing efforts do not align with the on-ground reality. 

At ITILITE, we make sure that we market what we have achieved. Not a single claim we make will be something that we have not delivered or something our customers will be unaware of.

Our 200+ customer base today is built on a very strong foundation of word-of-mouth, referral, and brand advocacy from existing customers. And we found that this has been the most impactful and lasting.

What were the internal decision processes in determining when to begin fundraising, and what were the logistics for this? And how many investors have you met so far, and how did you meet these investors and which channels worked best for you?

Mayank Kukreja: We have raised 3 rounds of funding so far, and fundraising has always been a 2-stage process. Meeting and building relationships with investors is an ongoing process. As step one, in these meetings, there is no fundraising discussion. Instead, we discuss what we are doing and how things are progressing.

Once we think that the company is at a stage where a bigger tranche of funds can be efficiently deployed for growth, we initiate a discussion with some of the investors where mutual liking is built over time. Fortunately for us, we never had to raise funds to ensure survival, and we aim to continue that!

What are the biggest challenges and obstacles that you have faced in the process of fundraising? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? 

Mayank Kukreja: Fortunately, all our fundraising rounds have been pretty smooth. However, we realized over time that it is always helpful to start building relationships early with VCs, much before you actually go to them for the fundraise. This makes sure they know you, your ethos, and the drive behind your company much better than through a 20-slide document.

What are your milestones for the next round? And what are your goals for the future?

Mayank Kukreja: Our goal for the next phase of our journey was well set out for us a few months ago, and despite the pandemic, we aim to continue along the same path. After the latest round of funding, we plan to accelerate international expansion and product development to meet the increasing demand in these markets. One addition to our roadmap will be an increased focus on safety and features that ensure safety beyond all else.

We tend not to plan for funding as our goal; rather, we aim to continue delivering great value to our customers. The rest will come as par for the course!

What are the most common mistakes companies make with global expansion?

Mayank Kukreja: A big mistake most companies have made in the past, and continue to make is to assume that the same strategy works everywhere. When the problems are different, the customers are different, and their contexts are different, how can your product or sales strategy remain the same? It is crucial to customize your approach, sometimes even your product, to the recipient’s context.

Whenever you enter a new market, be aware that the product-market-fit and go-to-market strategy must be re-established for the new audience and requirements.

Although business travel is a horizontal need, yet we took enough time to study every market and take action – be it minor tweaks in the product or our positioning for the best product-market-fit possible before we start our outreach. 

How do you handle this COVID-19 outbreak situation for your company’s survival in the future?

Mayank Kukreja: During the lockdowns, and initial stages of the pandemic, safely getting our travelers (users) back to the home base was the most pressing concern. 

After that, we used the downtime to refocus on the product in the context of COVID-19 and everything that had suddenly changed. Our focus areas were now safety and cost optimization above all since these were the core concerns of our customers.

What we realized was that there were two levels of impact we could create – immediate value and long-term change. The current concerns being immediate documentation support, audit-readiness, etc., and the long term being complete process optimization to ensure preparedness.

A lot of our customers have started using the product actively again over the phase of gradual unlock, and we foresee more as things ease. We have also had many new conversations that looked at improving overall business travel processes in the “Next Normal.”

Overall, it seems like we are walking a promising path, wherein we can create real and sustainable value for our customers with what we have built and are building.

What are the most common mistakes founders make when they start a company? 

Mayank Kukreja:

• Chase quick wins- Planning to go viral very quickly after launch and getting demotivated if that doesn’t happen is common. Plan and Commit for at least 18-24 months – For most startups, it takes time to get off the ground. One must remember, a startup is a marathon, with many sprints in between.
• Running a solo ship- If you have a cofounder (s), align deeply with why you are starting up and what you want the outcome to be. This will ensure that you will be focused and run like a single entity.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? And What advice do you have for someone who is interested in doing similar things like yours or in a similar direction?

Mayank Kukreja: “Be the dumbest person in the room” – It is something which helps in multiple ways: Forces you to look for smart and motivated people, and gives you the comfort of asking some very basic questions.

Asking the basic questions is a double win game – worst case, it makes you smarter by getting the answer, and in the best case, it makes everyone rethink their assumptions. 

What are the top-three books or movies (TV series) that changed your life and why?

Mayank Kukreja:

Book: Man’s search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Movie: Pursuit of Happyness 

Both give a powerful sense of purpose and help in stepping back and thinking about the “why” of doing what you are doing. 

How do you keep yourself motivated every day?

Mayank Kukreja: The team which we have built – our smart and motivated team members who are excitedly working towards a common goal of taking ITILITE to the next level is a strong motivation.

You can follow Mayank Kukreja here.

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