Startup Deep Dive : TravelTriangle — hit $100M in bookings, then its board fired the CEO

In November 2019, TravelTriangle told investors it had crossed $100 million in annual bookings and pulled in a fresh ₹93.5 crore ($13 million) Series D. Six months later, its own board fired the CEO and CTO it had just backed, and more than 80% of the staff who had helped build that number were gone within weeks.

The company that promised to fix India’s broken travel-agent trust problem ended up running headlong into a trust problem of its own — between its founders and the investors who funded them. This is the story of TravelTriangle: what it actually sells, how the money moves, the numbers behind its growth, and the boardroom fight that nearly ended it.

Quick facts

What they do

TravelTriangle runs an online marketplace for customised holiday packages. A traveller posts what kind of trip they want — say, a week in Bali or a Himachal road trip — and the platform routes that request to a curated network of local travel agents, who compete by sending back tailored itineraries and quotes. The traveller compares, negotiates and books through the agent of their choice, and TravelTriangle never touches the hotel rooms, flights or buses itself. As of its own current public description, the company says it works with more than 650 agents across more than 65 destinations, serving roughly 20 lakh (2 million) monthly visitors to the platform, according to TravelTriangle’s About Us page (accessed September 2026).

The origin

The idea traces back to the summer of 2010, when three childhood friends — Sankalp Agarwal, Sanchit Garg and Prabhat Gupta, all IIT graduates who had known each other since school — planned a trip to Leh. Booking it meant calling around to local travel agents, comparing patchy quotes over phone and email, and hoping nobody was overcharging them. They came back from the trip feeling like they had been taken for a ride, literally, according to accounts of the founding story reported by StartupTalky and the DSIM blog.

Agarwal was working at Adobe and Garg at Yahoo at the time. Both quit their jobs in 2010 and spent close to a year defining what would become TravelTriangle before launching in 2011, with Gupta, an IIT Guwahati graduate, joining as the core technology co-founder. The insight was simple: India had thousands of small, often excellent local travel agents, but no organised way for a traveller to discover and compare them side by side. Build that discovery layer, and take a cut of the trade that already happened informally on the phone.

The struggle years

TravelTriangle’s growth was real, but so were its losses, and they widened even as revenue climbed. In the fiscal year ended March 2018, revenue rose to about ₹22.2–22.5 crore from ₹14.06 crore the year before — a jump of nearly 60% — yet net loss also grew, from ₹37.44 crore in FY17 to ₹39.84 crore in FY18, an increase of 6.4%, as reported by Entrackr in October 2018. Growth was not translating into a narrowing gap between revenue and cost; the marketplace was getting bigger and less efficient at the same time.

The bigger crisis arrived with the pandemic. In March 2020, TravelTriangle laid off more than 250 employees, roughly half its workforce at the time, as India’s travel sector froze under lockdown, according to Entrackr’s May 2020 reporting. That was only the first cut. By June 2020, The Ken reported that the company had gone through three rounds of layoffs and had shed more than 80% of its pre-pandemic staff in total. A business that had been telling investors about $100 million in annual bookings just months earlier was, within one quarter, fighting to survive with a skeleton team.

Underneath the layoffs sat a second, quieter struggle: co-founder Sankalp Agarwal later left the company altogether, resurfacing in October 2022 as head of the North America division at edtech firm BrightCHAMPS, described in that report as TravelTriangle’s former CEO, per afaqs. A company built by three school friends around one bad travel-agent experience had, a decade on, lost one of its own founders to a different industry entirely.

The turning point

The single event that captures TravelTriangle’s crisis best is the boardroom fight of May 2020. On one side of it: a company that had just closed a $13 million Series D round in November 2019, was burning roughly ₹5 crore a month, and had built its business on the promise of scale — 1,000-plus agents and 8 million-plus monthly users at its 2020 peak, by the company’s own account cited in The Ken’s reporting. On the other side: investors who, according to The Ken, had grown uneasy with the founders’ fundraising choices and were said by the founders to have quietly explored a sale of the company to rival MakeMyTrip.

On 4 May 2020, the board removed both Sankalp Agarwal as CEO and Prabhat Gupta as CTO, installing chief operating officer Sanjeev Misra as interim chief executive. Agarwal fought back, approaching the National Company Law Tribunal to block the move, but the board pressed ahead regardless. Then, just as abruptly, the board reversed course: Agarwal was reinstated as CEO on 27 May 2020, according to Entrackr’s reporting from that period, with one source telling The Ken there was “no point in continuing to fight” given the company’s precarious position. The founder won his seat back, but by the time he did, more than four-fifths of the workforce that had scaled the company to its 2019 peak was already gone.

The money behind it

• Series A: $1.7 million, July 2014, led by Elevation Capital (then SAIF Partners) (Inc42 funding database).
• Series B: $8 million, April 2015, led by Elevation Capital (Inc42).
• Series B (extension): $10 million, February 2017, led by Elevation Capital with other participants (Inc42; Tracxn).
• Series C: $12 million, early 2018, led by Fundamentum with SAIF Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and RB Investments participating (Inc42).
• Venture debt: $3 million, October 2018, from InnoVen Capital (Inc42).
• Series D: ₹93.5 crore (reported as roughly $11–13 million), November 2019, from Fundamentum Partnership Fund I and the KB Global Platform Fund (Entrackr; Yourstory).
• Cumulative total: approximately $47.7 million across six institutional rounds as of November 2019 (Inc42); Tracxn separately puts total funding at $46.4 million across nine tranches, a small variance likely reflecting how debt and bridge rounds are counted.
• Last disclosed valuation: about $33.2 million, as of February 2017 (Tracxn; PitchBook) — no later valuation appears in public records, which itself signals the company has not raised at a headline “up round” since.
• No acquisition by or of TravelTriangle is confirmed in verifiable press records. Some data aggregators (Tracxn) list an acquisition of “John Allan Travel,” but that 2019 deal was actually done by an unrelated UK agency called Triangle Travel, as reported by Travel Weekly UK — not by this company. That mix-up is worth flagging precisely because it circulates in company databases as fact.

Elevation Capital (an early and repeat backer) pushed the company through its first three rounds and its 2020 boardroom fight; Fundamentum — co-founded by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and Sanjeev Aggarwal — stepped in as the lead for the later, larger rounds and is listed among the company’s co-founders/investors on its own About Us page; Bessemer Venture Partners brought international marketplace experience to the Series C.

How it makes money

• Travellers pay nothing to browse, request quotes or compare agents on the platform — the free side of the marketplace, as described in TravelTriangle’s own materials and in PhocusWire’s coverage of the model.
• Revenue comes from the agent side: agents on the network pay TravelTriangle a share of the value of bookings made through the platform, reportedly in the range of 5–8%, and up to 10% in some cases, per StartupTalky’s account of the model — a figure not independently corroborated elsewhere, so it should be read as a reported approximation rather than an audited rate.
• Agents also contribute a marketing budget to appear prominently and win traveller requests, effectively a pay-for-visibility layer on top of the commission.
• The part people get wrong: TravelTriangle is frequently mistaken for a tour operator or an online travel agent that owns inventory. It owns none — no hotel rooms, no buses, no guides. Its actual product is trust and demand: it verifies agents, curates reviews, and hands over a qualified lead, then steps back from the actual trip delivery. That asset-light design is what let it scale bookings quickly, and it is also exactly why its margin is thin — the value it can extract per booking is capped by what a marketplace can charge without pushing agents to simply deal with the traveller directly next time.

The numbers

Only three fiscal years of TravelTriangle’s revenue and profit/loss are available in verifiable public reporting — FY17 through FY19. No figures for FY20 onward were found in press coverage or public filings during this research; given the company’s pandemic-era disruption, more recent numbers may simply not have been reported publicly, and it would be a research failure to guess at them, so they are omitted rather than invented.

• FY18 revenue grew about 60% year-on-year, but net loss still grew 6.4% (Entrackr, October 2018).
• FY19 revenue grew roughly 55–58% year-on-year to ~₹35 crore, while net loss grew 21.7% to ₹48.7 crore per The Ken’s June 2020 reporting; Inc42’s company database separately lists the FY19 loss at ₹51.3 crore — the two figures are close but not identical, likely due to different treatment of one-off items.
• Across all three disclosed years, the loss has stayed at least 1.4–2.7 times the size of revenue — a marketplace that was growing its top line faster than the industry average, but not growing into profitability.

Where the money comes from

TravelTriangle has not publicly disclosed a formal revenue split by geography, segment or channel — no filing or press report surfaced in this research breaks out, for instance, domestic versus international package revenue, or leisure versus corporate travel. In the absence of that, the closest available proxies for where its business actually concentrates are these:

• Gross bookings value of roughly $100 million for calendar 2019, as the company reported to investors around its Series D raise, cited by The Ken (June 2020) — this is the clearest scale figure available, though it is a company-stated number, not an audited one.
• At its 2020 peak, per The Ken, the company claimed a network of 1,000-plus travel agents and 8 million-plus monthly users; its own current About Us page instead cites 650-plus agents, 65-plus destinations and about 20 lakh (2 million) monthly visitors — a marked contraction from the 2020 figures, consistent with the layoffs and disruption described above.
• The surprise here is less about a segment split and more about scale itself: the platform’s publicly stated footprint today is meaningfully smaller than what it claimed at its pre-pandemic high point, even though the company continued operating rather than shutting down.

The risks

• Third-party service quality it cannot fully control. Because TravelTriangle never delivers the trip itself, every traveller’s experience depends on an independent agent’s execution — its curation and review system can filter for quality up front, but it cannot enforce it during the actual holiday, which is a structural risk baked into any lead-generation marketplace.
• Persistent cash burn against a stale valuation. The company disclosed a monthly cash burn of about ₹5 crore around 2020 (The Ken), and its last publicly known valuation dates to February 2017 (Tracxn; PitchBook) — no later up-round has surfaced in public records, suggesting continued dependence on existing investors rather than fresh, higher-priced capital.
• Leadership and governance instability. Two co-founders were removed by the board in May 2020 and one was reinstated weeks later amid an NCLT dispute (Entrackr; The Ken); one of the three original founders subsequently left the company altogether by 2022 (afaqs) — a level of founder turnover that raises real questions about continuity at the top.

The takeaway

TravelTriangle’s chart of revenue climbing nearly 60% a year looks, on its own, like a startup success story. Put next to the loss line climbing in lockstep beside it, the same chart reads as a warning that was visible years before the pandemic ever forced the issue. The lesson is not really about travel marketplaces specifically: it is that a founding team and its investors can both be technically right — growth was real, the market need was real — and still end up in open conflict, because “growing fast” and “growing into a sustainable business” are different tests, and a downturn tends to force a company to answer whichever one it had been quietly failing.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded TravelTriangle and when?

TravelTriangle was founded in 2011 by Sankalp Agarwal, Sanchit Garg and Prabhat Gupta, three IIT-graduate school friends who came up with the idea after a frustrating trip to Leh in 2010, according to accounts reported by StartupTalky and the DSIM blog.

How does TravelTriangle make money if it doesn’t own hotels or run tours?

It runs a marketplace: travellers use it free of charge to request and compare quotes from a network of local travel agents, and the agents pay TravelTriangle a commission, reportedly in the region of 5–10%, on bookings made through the platform, per StartupTalky’s account of the model.

How much funding has TravelTriangle raised and who backed it?

Across six institutional rounds through November 2019, TravelTriangle raised approximately $47.7 million (Inc42), or $46.4 million by Tracxn’s count, from investors including Elevation Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fundamentum, RB Investments, SAIF Partners and InnoVen Capital.

What happened to TravelTriangle’s founders in 2020?

In May 2020, the company’s board removed co-founders Sankalp Agarwal (CEO) and Prabhat Gupta (CTO) amid pandemic-driven turmoil and investor-founder disagreements; Agarwal was reinstated as CEO later that month, though the company had by then cut more than 80% of its pre-pandemic workforce, according to Entrackr and The Ken.

Is TravelTriangle profitable today?

The most recent publicly reported financial year is FY19, when the company posted revenue of roughly ₹35 crore against a net loss of ₹48.7–51.3 crore. No profit or loss figures for FY20 or later were found in public reporting or filings during this research, so its current profitability cannot be verified either way.

Sources

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

• StartupTalky, “TravelTriangle Success Story | Business & Revenue Model | Funding” (accessed September 2026)
• DSIM Blog, “How a trip to Leh Ladakh led to the foundation of TravelTriangle” (accessed September 2026)
• Entrackr, “TravelTriangle continues to post losses despite 60% jump in revenue in FY18” (October 2018)
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: TravelTriangle has let go of its CEO and CTO” (May 2020)
• Entrackr, “TravelTriangle’s ousted CEO Sankalp Agarwal rejoins the firm” (July 2020)
• The Ken, “Investor-founder feud takes the wind out of TravelTriangle’s sails” (June 2020)
• Inc42, “TravelTriangle — Funding, Revenue & Investors” company database (accessed September 2026)
• Inc42, “TravelTriangle Financials” company database (accessed September 2026)
• Yourstory, “[Funding alert] Curated travel platform TravelTriangle…” (November 2019)
• Inc42, “Fundamentum Leads $12 Mn Series C Funding In Travel Marketplace TravelTriangle” (2018)
• Tracxn, “Travel Triangle” company profile (accessed September 2026)
• PitchBook, “TravelTriangle” company profile (accessed September 2026)
• Travel Weekly UK, “Triangle Travel acquires John Allan Travel” (2019)
• afaqs, “Travel Triangle founder, Sankalp Agarwal, joins BrightCHAMPS as Head of US Division” (October 2022)
• TravelTriangle, “About Us” (company website, accessed September 2026)
• PhocusWire, “TravelTriangle lets travellers find and pick deals from competing travel agents” (coverage of the company’s marketplace model)

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