Startup Deep Dive : Thrillophilia — the Rs 500 crore claim its own filings do not match

Thrillophilia tells the market it closed FY24 at more than ₹500 crore ($52.1 million) in revenue, growing 40.0% year on year. Its own audited filings, for the legal entity behind the brand, show revenue of ₹22.04 crore in FY25 and a net profit of just ₹45.19 lakh.

Both numbers are true. The gap between them is the whole story of how a bootstrapped travel platform out of Jaipur built one of India’s largest multi-day tour businesses without ever raising more than pocket change from outside investors.

Quick facts

What they do

Thrillophilia sells holidays, not tickets. Where a flight-and-hotel OTA sells one transaction at a time, Thrillophilia packages multi-day trips end to end: itinerary, hotels, local transport, activities, visas and on-trip support, sold directly to consumers through its website and app. It lists more than 20,000 curated experiences and itineraries across upward of 170 destinations, spanning domestic circuits such as Kerala houseboats and Kashmir honeymoons through to international runs in Europe, Southeast Asia and East Africa, as reported by exchange4media in September 2026. A separate travel-agent channel resells the same inventory to smaller agents and sub-agents for a cut of the booking.

The origin

Abhishek Daga and Chitra Gurnani Daga were not travel professionals. Abhishek studied chemical engineering at IIT-BHU and spent more than four years at Cisco; Chitra took an MBA in strategy and leadership at the Indian School of Business. What they shared was a habit of planning adventure trips together and running into the same wall every time: the operators who ran treks, safaris and water sports had almost no presence online, and the information that did exist was scattered and unreliable, as the founders recounted to YourStory and to CIIE.CO. That gap between demand for real experiences and a market too fragmented to be found became the founding insight. In 2011 the couple quit their jobs and started Thrillophilia as a pure-play adventure-activity listing site, first out of a small rented office in Bangalore, with the underlying private company having been incorporated in Jaipur in April 2009.

The struggle years

Thrillophilia ran on hustle rather than capital for most of its first decade. The founders put personal savings into the company and, by their own account, deliberately delayed drawing salaries until the business could support both of them, treating cash discipline as policy rather than accident, as described in Thrillophilia’s own retrospective published via exchange4media in September 2026.

The sharper test came in 2016 and 2017. Large online travel agents began bolting activities and experiences onto their own platforms, advertising costs rose sharply across the category, and a wave of smaller activity-booking startups that had grown alongside Thrillophilia shut down. Internally, the company had expanded into new geographies and signed up hundreds of vendors faster than it could manage supply quality and safety compliance. The response was a deliberate slowdown: Thrillophilia said it would only enter a new market once it could guarantee supply depth and repeat demand there, even if that meant giving up growth in gross bookings in the short term, per the company’s account of that period reported by exchange4media in September 2026. Neither the company nor independent filings from that period disclose the revenue or bookings impact of the 2016 to 2017 slowdown, so the scale of the near-miss cannot be verified beyond the qualitative account.

The turning point

For a decade Thrillophilia was, at its core, an activities marketplace: book a rafting trip, a safari, a heritage walk. The turning point was a deliberate pivot, made in 2021, into full multi-day holiday packages — the same product a traditional tour operator sells, but assembled and sold online. Before the pivot, the company’s business was built around single-activity bookings with relatively low order values. After it, Thrillophilia counts more than one million travellers booked on multi-day tours between FY21 and FY25, and describes itself as operating at a revenue scale of ₹500 crore and above with positive EBITDA, according to the company’s account carried by its own newsroom and by exchange4media in September 2026 and March 2026 respectively. The company has also told the press it is tracking toward roughly ₹750 crore in gross bookings for FY25, up more than 65.0% year on year, as reported by DNA India’s brand-insights desk. These figures are company-stated rather than independently audited, and neither publication names an underlying data source beyond the company.

The money behind it

Thrillophilia’s capital history is unusually thin for a company of its stated scale. The only externally documented funding round is a seed round of $200,000 (about ₹1.2 crore at the exchange rate prevailing in 2013), announced in September 2013, as reported at the time by YourStory and Inc42.

• Hyderabad Angels — anchor investor in the September 2013 round; brought early operator and angel-network validation to a pure-play adventure-activities startup (YourStory, September 2013).
• iLabs Venture Capital Fund — co-investor in the same round, one of the few institutional names to back the company at seed stage (Inc42, September 2013).
• Navlok Ventures and CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad — rounded out the syndicate; CIIE’s involvement reflects the company’s early incubation-circuit roots (FinSMEs, September 2013).

No subsequent institutional funding round is confirmed by a primary source: Thrillophilia has not issued a press release for a later raise, and third-party data aggregators show inconsistent, unattributed entries for a 2022 round that this piece cannot verify and has therefore cut. Total documented external funding stands at $200,000, and the company describes itself in current press coverage as bootstrapped and profitable rather than venture-backed. No valuation has ever been publicly disclosed.

How it makes money

Thrillophilia runs as a marketplace and tour operator hybrid, not a pure agent.

• Direct package sales — consumers book multi-day itineraries directly on thrillophilia.com or its app; the company assembles hotels, transport, activities and guides into one priced package.
• Activity and experience commissions — single-activity and short-experience bookings earn Thrillophilia a cut of the vendor’s price, in line with the wider online-travel-agent norm of roughly 15.0% to 30.0% commission per booking (industry commission ranges compiled by OTA Playbook and Basecamp Advertising, 2026).
• Travel-agent partner program — Thrillophilia resells its own inventory of 20,000-plus experiences to independent travel agents, who earn commissions of up to 30.0% for bookings routed through the platform, per Thrillophilia’s own partner materials.
• Ancillary services — visas, travel insurance and on-trip local-guide support are sold alongside the core package.

The part people get wrong is treating the headline “₹500 crore” as statutory revenue. For a marketplace that stitches together third-party hotels, transport and local operators, most of what a customer pays passes through to those vendors; only the margin Thrillophilia keeps is properly recognised as its own revenue. That is consistent with why the audited entity behind the brand reports revenue in the ₹22 to ₹39 crore range even as the company talks publicly about ₹500 crore-plus in bookings — the larger figure almost certainly describes gross transaction value, not net revenue, though neither the company nor its filings state the accounting treatment explicitly, so this piece treats the reconciliation as inference rather than confirmed fact.

The numbers

The only third-party-verifiable financials come from statutory filings for Thrillophilia Travel Solutions Private Limited (CIN U63040RJ2009PTC028658), sourced via Tofler and TheCompanyCheck from Ministry of Corporate Affairs records. Figures are in ₹ crore unless stated.

• FY24 revenue from operations: ₹39.26 crore, per MCA filing data compiled by growth-data aggregators citing the company’s statutory accounts (period: year ended 31 March 2024).
• FY25 revenue from operations: ₹21.34 crore, a decline of roughly 45.6% year on year at the operating-entity level (period: year ended 31 March 2025).
• FY25 net profit: ₹45.19 lakh, up sharply from a near-zero FY24 base, giving a net margin of about 2.05% on total income (Tofler/TheCompanyCheck, MCA data, filing as of FY25).
• These figures describe the audited legal entity only; they do not capture the wider “Thrillophilia” consumer brand’s gross transaction value, which the company separately states as ₹500 crore-plus (FY24) and a projected ₹750 crore (FY25) in press interviews.

Where the money comes from

Thrillophilia discloses a geography and channel split rather than a clean segment-wise revenue break-up.

• Domestic tier-2 cities: 38.0% of total bookings originate from tier-2 Indian cities, not the metros, as of the company’s most recent disclosure reported by DNA India’s brand-insights coverage.
• International footprint: the platform sells packages across 170-plus destinations spanning Europe, East Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia, alongside its India-heavy domestic book, per exchange4media, September 2026.
• Channel split: direct-to-consumer web and app bookings sit alongside a business-to-business travel-agent partner channel that resells the same inventory for commission, per the company’s partner program documentation.
• App-led demand: more than 500,000 app users are on record, against a base of three million-plus travellers served historically, per DNA India’s brand coverage.

The surprise is not the international glamour destinations; it is that more than a third of demand now comes from smaller Indian cities rather than the metro audiences OTAs traditionally chase, a mix shift the company is betting its new Gurgaon hub will help it serve at scale, as reported by BW Hotelier and Investment Guru India in their coverage of the office launch.

The risks

• Customer-service and refund friction at scale. Thrillophilia’s own Trustpilot storefront carries a 3.2-out-of-5 rating across roughly 4,752 reviews, with about 16.0% of reviews at one star, driven largely by refund delays and ticketing disputes (Trustpilot, accessed September 2026). At the volumes the company claims — three million-plus travellers — even a low complaint rate translates into a large absolute number of unhappy customers, which is a reputational and repeat-business risk for a brand that depends on word of mouth and SEO-driven discovery.
• Thin, unaudited disclosure of the headline numbers. The ₹500 crore-plus revenue and ₹750 crore gross-bookings figures the company gives to the press are not matched by the statutory filings available for its principal operating entity, which show single-digit-to-low-double-digit crore revenue. Until Thrillophilia publishes a reconciliation, outside observers cannot verify the scale it claims, which is a risk for anyone extending it credit, partnership terms or investor interest on the strength of the larger number.
• Structural dependence on third-party vendors. Because multi-day packages are stitched together from hotels, local transport operators and activity vendors that Thrillophilia does not own, service quality, pricing and availability all sit partly outside its direct control — the same structural weakness that reportedly triggered the 2016 to 2017 slowdown, when rapid vendor onboarding outpaced quality control.

The takeaway

Thrillophilia’s most transferable lesson is not about travel; it is about what “profitable” actually buys a founder. Because the company never took on a large institutional round, it never had to defend a growth-at-all-costs number to a board. That let it do something venture-backed rivals structurally struggle to do: slow down on purpose in 2016 and 2017, turn away growth it could not service safely, and only re-accelerate once supply quality caught up. The trade-off is equally real. Without outside capital or audit scrutiny that comes with it, the company’s headline scale claims rest almost entirely on its own word, and the gap between the story it tells the press and the numbers it files with the registrar is now large enough that it, not the destinations it sells, has become the more interesting part of the Thrillophilia story.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Thrillophilia and when?

Thrillophilia was founded in 2011 in Bangalore by husband-and-wife team Abhishek Daga and Chitra Gurnani Daga; the underlying private limited entity was incorporated in Jaipur in April 2009.

How much funding has Thrillophilia raised?

The only publicly documented external round is a $200,000 seed round from Hyderabad Angels, iLabs Venture Capital Fund, Navlok Ventures and CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad, announced in September 2013. No later institutional round is confirmed by a primary source, and the company describes itself as bootstrapped.

Is Thrillophilia profitable?

The company tells the press it is EBITDA positive at a revenue scale of ₹500 crore-plus (FY24). Its audited operating entity’s filings show a much smaller but real net profit of ₹45.19 lakh on revenue of ₹22.04 crore in FY25.

What is the difference between Thrillophilia’s stated revenue and its filed revenue?

Press coverage cites company-stated gross bookings or transaction value (₹500 crore-plus for FY24, a projected ₹750 crore for FY25). Statutory filings for Thrillophilia Travel Solutions Private Limited show operating revenue of ₹39.26 crore (FY24) and ₹21.34 crore (FY25) — figures consistent with a marketplace recognising commission income rather than the full value of bookings passed through to vendors.

Is Thrillophilia planning an IPO?

No IPO filing, DRHP or public listing plan has been reported for Thrillophilia as of September 2026; the company remains a private limited entity.

Sources

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

• Exchange4media, “How this small-town engineer built Thrillophilia into a Rs 500-cr brand without a playbook”, September 2026
• Investment Guru India, “Thrillophilia Scales with New Gurgaon Hub Amid 40% YoY Growth”, September 2026
• Thrillophilia newsroom, “Thrillophilia Expands India Presence with New Gurgaon Office to Power Next Phase of Global Growth”, September 2026
• Thrillophilia newsroom, “Thrillophilia Wins ‘AI in Travel’ at ET Entrepreneur Awards 2026”, March 2026
• DNA India Insights, “Why Thrillophilia Is India’s #1 Tour Package Company”, 2026
• YourStory, “How and why $200,000 was invested in Thrillophilia’s adventure”, September 2013
• Inc42, “Thrillophilia, the Online Travel Curation Startup, Raises $200,000 from Hyderabad Angels & Others”, September 2013
• FinSMEs, “Thrillophilia.com Raises Equity Funding”, September 2013
• CIIE.CO (Medium), “Fun Is Serious Business: Thrillophilia — Chitra Gurnani Daga”, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “Thrillophilia Travel Solutions Private Limited — Financials”, MCA filing data, accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, “Thrillophilia Adventure Tours Private Limited — Company Details”, MCA filing data, accessed September 2026
• Trustpilot, “Thrillophilia Reviews”, accessed September 2026
• OTA Playbook, “OTA Commission Models for Tour Operators: What You’re Actually Paying”, 2026
• Basecamp Advertising, “OTA Commissions for Tour Operators: The True Cost”, 2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026

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