The Flipkart Brain Behind a $63 Million Travel Fintech Bet—And a Valuation That Just Doubled

BENGALURU — May 25, 2026 — Anil Goteli was 4 a.m. awake in a Dharamshala hotel lobby, his family asleep upstairs, the December cold pressing against the windows. He had left Flipkart after nearly a decade—the books business, the home and furniture division, the entire marketplace, the pricing algorithms, the Big Billion Days. He had helped build India's largest e‑commerce company from a scrappy startup into a Walmart‑owned giant. And now, at 4 a.m. on what was supposed to be a vacation, he was trying to decide what to build next. "I was constantly thinking about what to build," he recalled. "Then one morning it struck me, why don't I build a card that rewards people for travel?"

That spark became Scapia—a travel‑and‑credit platform built around a co‑branded credit card with Federal Bank. Unlike typical reward cards that scatter points across a dozen categories, Scapia was built with a single, almost obsessive focus: getting people to travel more by letting them earn coins on everything they spend and redeem those coins seamlessly on flights, hotels, and experiences inside the same app. The card, Goteli would later say, "sits in your pocket through the year, but the rewards nudge you to travel more."

On May 21, 2026, the conviction that had seized him in that hotel lobby was validated in the most concrete way possible. Scapia closed a $63 million Series C funding round led by General Catalyst, with participation from existing investors Peak XV Partners and Z47. The round valued the Bengaluru‑based company at approximately $450 million—more than double the valuation from its Series B just thirteen months earlier. Total funding now stands at $135 million. Over the past year, flight bookings on the platform have grown five to six times, hotel bookings have surged eightfold, and the company has expanded from a single co‑branded credit card into a full‑fledged travel lifestyle ecosystem that includes a UPI‑based rewards product, an AI‑powered curated experiences platform, an in‑house travel merchandise marketplace, and partnerships with two banks—Federal Bank and BOBCARD—with more on the way. The 250‑member team will now use the fresh capital to scale to millions of customers across India, accelerate an AI‑first approach to product development, and attract top talent across engineering, product, data science, and design.

The Engineer Who Built Websites Before He Knew How

Anil Goteli was not a natural entrepreneur. He was a natural engineer—and then, methodically, he became something more.

He was born in Ramachandrapuram, a small town in Andhra Pradesh, and moved to Chennai when his father, an electronics engineer, joined HCL in its earliest years. The family home was one of the first in the neighbourhood to have a television and, later, a personal computer. "I got my first computer around 1990," he said. He did not study computer science formally, but even as an undergraduate at IIT Madras—where he graduated in electrical engineering in 2002—he was already building. A website called 15to21.com, targeted at young people. It was not a business. It was an instinct.

After IIT, he went to the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign for a master's in electrical and communications engineering. His first job was at Qualcomm, where he worked on the chipset that later powered the first iPhone. "I worked on the first 3.6 Mbps call between Qualcomm and Nortel in Paris," he recalled. But even at Qualcomm, deep inside one of the most advanced engineering organisations in the world, he felt the pull toward decision‑making rather than engineering alone. In 2009, he enrolled at the Kellogg School of Management. Before business school, he spent two months in India working at Coca‑Cola, figuring out how to improve regional sales. During the MBA, he worked at a venture firm evaluating startups. All of this was intentional—a long, deliberate detour to build business and strategy instincts on top of an engineering foundation.

When he graduated in 2011, he moved back to India. It was considered a risk. "It was probably one of the best decisions I made in my life," he said.

A short stint at McKinsey India led him to Flipkart in its formative years. He began by running the e‑books business before realising, as he puts it, "Very quickly, we realised Indians don't read as much as they study." He shifted to physical books, one of Flipkart's core early categories. Over the next nine years, he became part of Flipkart's leadership spine—running books, then home and furniture, then the entire marketplace. He led pricing, promotions, and the Big Billion Days, the annual sales event that had become the anchor of Indian e‑commerce. "I learnt how to build and scale a business from scratch," he said.

But after nine years, he hit a personal inflection point. "If I don't leave now and start on my own, then when will I?"

The Gap Nobody Had Closed

The insight that emerged from that 4 a.m. hotel lobby was not about credit. It was about travel. Specifically, it was about the gap between how often young Indians wanted to travel—and how hard the financial system made it for them to do so.

India's credit card penetration remains among the lowest in the world: roughly 10 crore cards for a population of 1.4 billion. The existing travel‑focused cards were almost exclusively premium products—American Express Platinum, HDFC Diners Club, Axis Atlas—with annual fees in the thousands and eligibility requirements that excluded the vast majority of young Indians. The mass‑market cards, by contrast, offered generic rewards that could be redeemed for cashback or vouchers but did nothing to encourage or facilitate travel. There was no product in the market that was affordable, accessible, and unambiguously built around the proposition that its users wanted to see the world.

Goteli's insight was that a co‑branded credit card—issued in partnership with a bank, carrying a major network logo, with zero forex markup and no annual fee—could serve as the entry point for a much larger ecosystem. The card would earn travel coins on every transaction. The coins could be redeemed inside the same app for flights, hotels, buses, trains, and experiences. The app would also serve as a booking platform, a rewards marketplace, and, eventually, a travel‑lifestyle destination. The card was not the product. It was the key.

"You have to be a brand that is in their face when they're thinking of travel," Goteli told Inc42. "That's the time to be in front of them."

The Co‑Branded Card as Platform

Scapia launched its first co‑branded credit card in partnership with Federal Bank in June 2023. The timing was inauspicious. The Reserve Bank of India had recently tightened its regulations around co‑branded credit cards, requiring that the banking partner—not the fintech—exercise greater control over customer acquisition, underwriting, and servicing. Several fintechs, Scapia included, were forced to pause card issuance while they restructured their arrangements to comply with the new rules.

The pause could have been fatal. A startup that cannot issue its core product for months at a time is a startup that is bleeding cash, burning momentum, and losing the trust of the partners whose balance sheets it depends on. Scapia survived the pause, resumed issuance in 2024, and emerged with a stronger, more sustainable model. The company added BOBCARD—the credit card arm of Bank of Baroda—as its second banking partner. It launched a dual‑network card that operates on both Visa and RuPay, becoming the first Indian fintech to do so. And it began building out the ecosystem that Goteli had envisioned from the start.

The platform now spans far beyond the card. Scapia Pay is a UPI‑based rewards product that allows users to earn coins on everyday payments. Scapia Store is an in‑house marketplace for travel merchandise—luggage, backpacks, apparel, gadgets—curated from brands including Columbia, Nasher Miles, Tripole, and XYXX. Scapia Experiences is an AI‑powered platform that helps travellers discover and book curated trips based on their preferences, budget, and timeline. Add‑on credit cards, bill payments via BBPS, airport privileges, and zero‑forex international spending round out the offering.

The result is a platform that earns revenue from multiple streams—interchange fees, merchant commissions, travel booking margins, and marketplace sales—rather than depending entirely on the thin economics of a co‑branded card programme. "Cards is one of the products we have, but it's equally important for us to be able to sell more travel and sell all the products," Goteli said. "Even categories like hotels are quite important in the mix."

The Gen Z Bet

The single most important strategic decision Scapia has made is not a product feature. It is a demographic focus. The company has built its entire brand identity around a customer who is under 30, digital‑native, and treats travel not as a luxury to be saved for over years but as a baseline expectation of a well‑lived life.

The median age of a Scapia customer is 26 to 28. Nearly 80 to 85 percent of spending on the platform is driven by domestic travel—young Indians exploring their own country before venturing abroad. Tier‑II and Tier‑III cities are driving a growing share of bookings, reflecting the broader geographic flattening of Indian consumption that has reshaped everything from e‑commerce to entertainment. And the behaviour on the platform is strikingly different from traditional travel booking sites: the average Scapia user books five to six trips a year, compared with two to three on most travel platforms. The card is being used 15 to 20 times a month for everyday spending, with four to five of those transactions being travel‑related.

The engagement numbers suggest a platform that has become more than a utility. One in three Scapia users now prefers shopping and dining over traditional lounge access—a shift the company's Airport Privileges feature was built to serve. The UPI app, launched recently, has seen active customers transacting or opening the app 15 to 20 times a month, a frequency more commonly associated with payments giants like PhonePe and Google Pay.

"India's next wave of consumer companies will be built around behaviours that are genuinely new—not just digital versions of what came before," said Neeraj Arora, CEO of India and MENA at General Catalyst. "Scapia understood early that a generation of Indians for whom travel is a baseline expectation, not an aspiration, needed a financial product designed around that identity."

The Financials Beneath the Growth

The financial picture is a work in progress. Scapia reported operating revenue of ₹28.7 crore in FY25, up 71 percent from ₹16.8 crore in FY24. Including other income of ₹11.6 crore, total income for the period stood at ₹40.4 crore. Net losses narrowed to ₹83 crore from ₹88 crore the previous year—a modest improvement of roughly 6 percent. The company is not profitable. It is not close to profitable. But the trajectory—revenue growing at 70 percent while losses remain flat—is the kind of operating‑leverage signal that growth‑stage investors look for.

Goteli has been direct about the company's approach to profitability. "We are not in a hurry to make profits," he told Moneycontrol. "We are focusing on expanding into more travel categories and investing in and launching new products. As we become bigger, we will obviously move more and more towards profitability and sustainability. But at the same time, we are not going to be in a hurry to turn profitable at the expense of growth."

The $63 million Series C gives Scapia the runway to pursue that balance. Total funding now stands at $135 million. The valuation has more than doubled from the Series B in April 2025 to approximately $450 million. The investor base—General Catalyst, Peak XV Partners, Z47, Elevation Capital, Tanglin Ventures—represents a cross‑section of Indian and global growth‑stage capital.

The company is also laying the groundwork for future revenue lines. Goteli confirmed that Scapia intends to enter lending in partnership with banks and NBFCs, though it has no plans to establish its own NBFC in the near term. The lending product—likely travel‑related personal loans or book‑now‑pay‑later options—would add a high‑margin revenue stream to complement the lower‑margin interchange and travel‑booking economics. The UPI app, the travel marketplace, and the AI‑powered experiences platform each represent additional vectors for monetisation.

The Competition

Scapia operates at the intersection of two fiercely competitive markets—travel booking and consumer credit—and the incumbents in both are well‑funded and entrenched.

On the travel side, MakeMyTrip and its Goibibo subsidiary dominate online bookings. EaseMyTrip, Cleartrip (owned by Flipkart/Walmart), and Ixigo compete for share. On the credit side, a new generation of fintech‑backed cards—Uni Cards, Niyo, Jupiter's Edge CSB card, Fi's Amplifi card—are targeting the same Gen Z and millennial demographic with overlapping value propositions. The co‑branded credit card market has become crowded, and the Reserve Bank's tighter regulations have raised the compliance burden for all players.

Scapia's differentiation is the integration of travel and credit into a single, purpose‑built platform. Most competing cards offer travel rewards as one category among many. Scapia offers travel rewards as the entire premise. The booking platform, the merchandise marketplace, the AI‑powered experiences engine, and the UPI rewards layer are all built around the same thesis: that a young Indian who travels five or six times a year will stay within an ecosystem that makes every trip easier, cheaper, and more rewarding.

Whether that thesis can sustain a durable competitive advantage against rivals with deeper distribution and broader product suites is an open question. Scapia is not yet open to non‑card users, though Goteli said the company may open the platform on a trial basis for avid travellers. A full opening would dramatically expand the addressable market but would also dilute the card's role as the entry point into the ecosystem—a trade‑off that the company is still evaluating.

What This Signals

The Scapia story is not primarily about a co‑branded credit card. It is about the collision of two massive structural shifts—India's travel boom and its consumer credit awakening—and about the entrepreneurs who are building at the intersection of the two.

India is in the early stages of a travel revolution. Rising disposable incomes, the proliferation of affordable flights and hotels, the Instagram‑fueled desire for experiences, and a cultural shift away from saving‑first‑travel‑later toward borrowing‑to‑travel‑now have combined to create a market that is growing faster than any major travel market in the world. The Gen Z travel spend in India is projected to grow from $32 billion in FY24 to $102 billion by 2030—a more than threefold increase in six years. The financial product that captures even a fraction of that spend will be a very large business.

Simultaneously, India is in the early stages of a consumer credit revolution. Credit card penetration, while still low by global standards, is growing steadily. Co‑branded cards—issued in partnership between banks and consumer brands—are among the fastest‑growing segments of the market, particularly among younger consumers who are more loyal to brands than to banks. The fintech that can build the most compelling co‑branded proposition for the travel‑obsessed generation will have a relationship that compounds for decades.

Anil Goteli is not the founder he was supposed to be. He was supposed to be an engineer at Qualcomm, or a consultant at McKinsey, or a senior executive at Flipkart—any of the comfortable, well‑compensated roles that his resume entitled him to. Instead, at 4 a.m. in a Dharamshala hotel lobby, he decided to build something from scratch. The $63 million Series C, the $450 million valuation, and the 17,500+ pincodes are the market's judgment that the decision was correct. The card that sits in the pocket through the year and nudges its holder to travel more is no longer an experiment. It is a platform. And the generation that treats travel as a baseline expectation, not an aspiration, is just beginning to pack.