Startup Deep Dive : TBO Tek — the travel platform that never sells to travellers

TBO Tek has never sold a single holiday, flight or hotel room to a traveller. It is not allowed to, by design. And yet in FY25 this company that ordinary Indians have never booked anything from turned over ₹1,737 crore and kept ₹230 crore of it as profit, with a stock market valuing it at roughly ₹18,500 crore (about $1.93 billion, converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) two years after it went public.

The contradiction is the whole story. TBO Tek started life in 2006 as a consumer-facing travel website, the same business MakeMyTrip and Yatra were building at the time. Within a year its founders had abandoned that plan entirely and rebuilt the company to sell only to travel agents, never to the public. That refusal to compete for the traveller’s attention is what let it survive a pandemic that halved the travel industry’s revenue overnight, and it is why a business almost nobody outside the trade has heard of listed on the NSE and BSE in May 2024 at a 55% premium to its issue price.

Quick facts

What TBO Tek does

TBO Tek runs a business-to-business travel distribution platform. It does not sell trips to travellers. Instead it sits between two sets of businesses: suppliers of travel inventory — hotels, airlines, car rental firms, cruise lines, rail and ancillary product providers — on one side, and travel agents, tour operators and other travel sellers on the other. A travel agent in Lagos or Manila who needs a hotel room block in Bangkok, or a fare on an airline TBO Tek has a distribution agreement with, logs into TBO’s platform, books through its API or web portal, and TBO Tek handles the inventory sourcing, pricing, payments and settlement in between. The company describes itself as operating across more than 100 countries, and as of FY24 its base of travel-buyer accounts had grown past 213,000, up from about 45,000 three years earlier, as per company disclosures cited in press coverage of its results.

The origin

Ankush Nijhawan grew up around the travel trade. His family ran Nijhawan Travels, a Delhi-based offline travel agency and General Sales Agent for British Airways, built by his grandfather and father. Ankush graduated in 2000, spent a short stint at ESPN in the United States, and then returned to India to work in the family business. Gaurav Bhatnagar took a different route: an IIT Delhi computer science graduate who had worked at Microsoft, he was running his own software services company and had become convinced that travel would be one of the first consumer categories to move fully online, since a night in a hotel or a seat on a flight needs no warehouse or delivery van, only a confirmed booking.

The two joined forces in 2005 and launched Travel Boutique Online as a consumer-facing online travel agency, chasing the same opportunity that MakeMyTrip and Yatra were chasing. It did not last. As people close to the business at the time reportedly told the founders, competing head-on in a crowded, well-capitalised B2C market made little sense when the two of them already had standing and trust with travel agents through the family’s offline agency relationships. That insight — that the underserved, unglamorous B2B side of Indian travel distribution was still running on phone calls and paper vouchers — became the real founding idea. The first booking went through the reworked B2B platform in 2007.

The struggle years

The pivot away from B2C in 2006–07 was the first hard reset: a working, funded consumer product abandoned within roughly a year of launch to rebuild around a customer TBO Tek had not originally set out to serve. It meant giving up any claim to the consumer brand recognition that MakeMyTrip and Yatra would go on to build, in exchange for a narrower, less visible market that had almost no organised online competition at the time.

The second, far larger shock came in FY20–21. When COVID-19 shut down international and domestic travel, TBO Tek’s business — which only exists when agents are booking trips for real travellers — had almost nothing to distribute. Gross transaction value fell from roughly ₹12,166 crore in FY20, and press coverage of the period describes the company’s topline collapsing by close to 75% as lockdowns, cancelled bookings and stalled consumer confidence emptied the travel pipeline, as reported at the time by CARE Ratings in its credit assessment of the company. TBO Tek used the enforced pause to cut costs and rebuild its technology stack rather than shut down, and green shoots of recovery only appeared from around May 2021 as destinations began reopening.

The pandemic’s aftershocks also delayed TBO Tek’s path to the stock market. The company reportedly filed and then withdrew a draft IPO prospectus in 2021, when post-pandemic travel demand was still too weak to support a public listing, before refiling in 2023 and finally going public in May 2024 — a gap of roughly three years between its first attempt at an IPO and its actual listing.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point is the IPO itself. TBO Tek’s initial public offering opened on 8 May 2024 with a price band of ₹875 to ₹920 a share, was subscribed 86.7 times over, and raised a little over ₹1,550.81 crore in total — ₹400 crore of fresh capital into the company plus an offer for sale of existing shares. When the stock listed on 15 May 2024, it opened at ₹1,426 on the NSE, a 55% premium to the ₹920 issue price, and at ₹1,380 on the BSE, a 50% premium. A company that had pulled its own listing plans three years earlier, in the shadow of a pandemic that had gutted its revenue, was now valued by the market at a level that implied investors believed the recovery was durable, not a one-off bounce.

The money behind it

TBO Tek ran for its first six years without institutional capital, funded by the founders and the cash flow of the underlying travel business. Its first outside backer was Naspers, the South African media and internet investor, which took a majority stake in the company around 2012. In 2015, Standard Chartered Private Equity acquired that Naspers stake at a reported valuation of about ₹300 crore — a fraction of what the company would be worth at listing less than a decade later. Standard Chartered Private Equity’s Asia platform was later spun out and rebranded as Affirma Capital, which went on to invest a further $50 million into TBO Tek in 2018, growth capital that funded the company’s push into international markets ahead of its IPO. Across its disclosed pre-IPO rounds, TBO Tek is reported to have raised a total of about $61 million from institutional investors, per data aggregated by Tracxn, before the company raised ₹400 crore of fresh primary capital at its May 2024 listing.

How it makes money

TBO Tek runs an asset-light, two-sided marketplace and earns money in two distinct ways. Under what it calls the B2B rate model, it buys inventory — hotel room nights, airline seats, car rentals, cruise cabins — from suppliers at negotiated B2B rates, adds a markup, and resells at that marked-up price to travel agents; its margin is simply the gap between what it pays the supplier and what it charges the buyer. Under its commission model, the supplier sets the end price itself, and TBO Tek earns a commission on the transaction, part of which it shares back with the buying agent as an incentive to keep booking through the platform. Published take rates vary sharply by category: airline bookings, a commoditised product with thin margins across the industry, earn TBO Tek only about 2.5–2.6%, while hotel bookings — a less standardised, higher-margin product — earn somewhere between 7% and 8%, and international hotel bookings carry meaningfully better take rates than domestic Indian ones. The part outsiders most often get wrong is assuming TBO Tek is a consumer travel company like the OTAs it shares headlines with; it never sells to, refunds, or has a support relationship with the end traveller at all — its only customer is the agent standing between it and that traveller.

The numbers

TBO Tek’s consolidated revenue and net profit have grown every year since the pandemic trough, as the table below shows (figures in ₹crore, per the company’s audited consolidated financial statements as compiled by Screener.in).

Revenue is only a fraction of the volume actually flowing through the platform. In FY25, TBO Tek’s gross transaction value — the total value of bookings processed, most of which is passed through to suppliers — crossed ₹30,832 crore, up sharply on the previous year, while adjusted EBITDA grew about 22% year-on-year to roughly ₹329 crore, according to the company’s FY25 results as reported by Travel Trade Journal and BW Businessworld.

Where the money comes from

TBO Tek’s growth engine has quietly shifted away from India and away from air travel. In FY25, the company’s international markets grew GTV by around 43% year-on-year, with Europe up about 70% and Asia-Pacific up about 66%, both comfortably outpacing the India business, as reported in the company’s FY25 results coverage. The hotels segment has also overtaken air as the more important growth driver, a reversal from TBO Tek’s early years when airline ticketing was the larger business; hotels now carry a materially better take rate too, which is part of why revenue has grown faster than gross transaction value in recent years. The surprise for anyone who assumes TBO Tek is primarily an Indian outbound-travel play is how international the business already is: it operates through offices across the Middle East, Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, and its buyer base of more than 213,000 travel agents spans well beyond India’s own trade.

The risks

Three risks stand out, and the company discloses versions of each in its own filings and investor communication. First, disintermediation: TBO Tek’s entire business depends on suppliers choosing to distribute through it rather than directly to agents or through a rival aggregator; any consolidation among large hotel chains or airlines that lets them build their own agent-facing distribution technology would squeeze out exactly the middleman role TBO Tek occupies. Second, India’s civil aviation market is dominated by a small number of large carriers, a structure that limits TBO Tek’s negotiating leverage on airline inventory and pricing and keeps its already-thin air take rate, around 2.5%, under constant pressure. Third, working-capital and settlement risk: in its B2B rate model TBO Tek pays suppliers and collects from agents on different timelines, and delayed payments from airlines in particular can strain cash flow, since the company is contractually on the hook to suppliers regardless of when its own buyers settle up.

The takeaway

TBO Tek’s founders spent a year building the wrong company before they built the right one, and the correction came from listening to the market they already had relationships in rather than chasing the market that looked more exciting. The lesson that travels beyond travel is not “focus on B2B” as a formula; it is that the most defensible position in a two-sided market is often the unglamorous side nobody else wants to serve, provided you already understand it well enough to build for it before you have to learn it from scratch.

Frequently asked questions

What does TBO Tek do?

TBO Tek runs a business-to-business travel distribution platform, connecting suppliers such as hotels, airlines, car rental firms and cruise lines with travel agents and tour operators in more than 100 countries. It does not sell directly to individual travellers.

Who founded TBO Tek and when?

TBO Tek was founded in 2006 as Travel Boutique Online by Ankush Nijhawan and Gaurav Bhatnagar in Gurugram, initially as a consumer travel website before pivoting to a B2B-only model within about a year.

Is TBO Tek profitable?

Yes. TBO Tek reported a consolidated net profit of ₹230 crore on revenue of ₹1,737 crore in FY25 (year to March 2025), continuing a run of profitable growth every year since FY22, per its audited consolidated financial statements.

When did TBO Tek list on the stock market, and how did the IPO go?

TBO Tek’s initial public offering opened on 8 May 2024 at a price band of ₹875–920 a share, was subscribed 86.7 times, and the stock listed on 15 May 2024 at a 55% premium on the NSE and a 50% premium on the BSE over its issue price.

How does TBO Tek make money if it does not sell to travellers?

It earns a markup on B2B hotel, air, car rental and cruise inventory it resells to travel agents, and commissions on bookings where suppliers set the end price themselves; hotel bookings earn a take rate of roughly 7–8%, against about 2.5–2.6% on airline bookings.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• StartupTalky, “TBO Tek: Revolutionizing Travel with Technology-Driven Solutions” (accessed September 2026)
• Business Today, “TBO Tek shares make a strong market debut; stock list at 55% premium on NSE,” 15 May 2024
• Screener.in, TBO Tek Ltd consolidated financial data (accessed September 2026)
• BW Businessworld, “TBO Tek Posts ₹1,737 Cr Revenue In FY25, Driven By Europe & APAC Growth” (2025)
• Travel Trade Journal, “TBO Tek Ltd delivers strong performance in FY25 on the back of robust growth in Hotels segment” (2025)
• Tickertape, TBOTEK share price and market capitalisation data (accessed September 2026)
• CARE Ratings, credit rating press release on TBO Tek Limited (erstwhile Tek Travels Private Limited), April 2022
• A Junior VC, “Is ₹4,000 Cr TBO Quietly Building a Global Travel Unicorn from India?” (accessed September 2026)
• TBO.com, Board of Directors page (accessed September 2026)
• Tracxn, TBO company profile — funding and investor data (accessed September 2026)
• JM Financial and Anand Rathi equity research notes on TBO Tek, cited via aggregated web search (2024)

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