From an engineering graduate to the co-founder of one of India's leading travel brands, Mr. Rajnish Kumar has spent over two decades building ixigo around a simple belief: technology can make travel simpler and more accessible. What began as an effort to solve everyday travel problems has grown into a platform that millions of travellers rely on for their travel needs every day.

Mr. Rajnish began his career at Amadeus SAS in France - first as a Software Engineer, later heading its technical function - before returning to India and co-founding ixigo in 2007.

Under his leadership, ixigo has grown from an early-stage company into India's leading AI-based travel platform, serving over 57 crore Annual Active Users in FY26. He has led the company's product, technology, and AI strategy across this journey, while building the teams and technology behind its evolution. He was honoured with the 2023 Distinguished Alumni Award by IIT Kanpur and recognised in the 'Comeback Kid' category at the Economic Times Start-up Awards 2021. He is also an active mentor and investor in India's start-up ecosystem and the author of Made in Fire, a book on entrepreneurship, resilience and building enduring companies.

After 25 years since his graduation, Mr. Rajnish Kumar returned to the IIT Kanpur campus as the Guest of Honour at the CSE Department Convocation 2026. During his visit, DoRA media team had the opportunity to speak with him about his journey from being a student at IIT Kanpur to co-founding ixigo.

In the conversation, he reflected on the challenges that shaped his journey as an entrepreneur, including the unprecedented crisis during the pandemic when ixigo saw its numbers drop to zero overnight. He spoke about the difficult decisions that helped the company navigate the crisis, the experiences that shaped its culture, and the lessons he learned along the way.

He also spoke about his book Made in Fire, drawing on nearly two decades of building ixigo to share lessons on entrepreneurship, resilience and building enduring companies, alongside his thoughts on what today's graduates need to keep in mind as technology and AI continue to reshape the world.

In his own words, he reflects on the journey.

"I had no idea what those years ahead would hold"

It feels surreal to be back here. I feel wonderful to be back after 25 years. Twenty-five years ago, when I walked out of this place, I had absolutely no idea what would happen in the years ahead. I had no idea I would go on to start a company - and, most importantly, that I would do it for the next two decades. I had no idea I would write a book, and I had no idea I would be back here as the Guest of Honour. So, I'm really, really excited to be back. Most of the meaningful things that happened in my life happened once I left IIT - but almost all of them were enabled right here.

Back in the day, success for most of us was either getting into the most coveted university in the US, or landing a well-paying job and building a great career out of it. I think what's changed now is that the definition of success is more about building something meaningful - creating an impact in the lives of millions of people. And I think that's what makes this moment so exciting.

I look back at how difficult it was to crack the JEE. No matter how much you prepared, the questions were always different, never seen before - you had to learn how to solve a problem you'd never solved before. I think the most important thing I learned at IIT was learning how to learn. That lesson became the most important one in my life, because building a company means navigating constant uncertainty. You have to keep learning, keep reinventing yourself. That's the only real way to survive.

The second thing IIT taught me: I came from a school where I was probably the smartest person in the room for over a decade. When I arrived here, almost everybody around me was smarter than me. That taught me that you have to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. When we started hiring at ixigo, the mantra became: hire people who are smarter than yourself. In the end, the success of a company doesn't depend on how smart the founders are - it depends on how great a team they're able to assemble.

When we started, we were solving for travel. We realized travel was broken, and that technology could solve a lot of those problems. That obsession with solving consumer problems is what made me start out on this path. If you're genuinely obsessed with solving consumer problems, at some point you'll find yourself on the same road to entrepreneurship.

The easy answer is resilience - that's the reason we survived. But you're only resilient because you never give up. There were times we were probably one day away from shutting down, but we kept fighting, found a way out, and lived to fight another day.

The other thing that mattered was ingenuity. When you're in a tough spot with your back against the wall, instinct says there are only two outcomes - fight or flight. For us, it was always about finding ingenious ways to invent something and get out of that situation, so we'd come out stronger on the other side.

COVID was unprecedented. Just when we thought we'd seen it all, COVID happened. I remember the moment our dashboards showed zero - zero bookings, zero revenue, everything at a standstill. My heart rate went up to 120 while I was talking to my co-founder Alok about what to do next. The only thing we were worried about wasn't the spreadsheets or the revenue - it was our people, and our consumers.

So, the first decision we made was not to let go of anybody. It was hard - we only had a few months of runway left, and the only obvious way to survive was to cut people. We decided against it, because we saw it as a humanitarian crisis: if we let them go, they wouldn't find another job outside. So, we invented a mathematical formula for salary cuts, proportionate to what people earned. There was no cut at all for people at the bottom of the salary curve, and very deep cuts for people at the top - several of us in the leadership team went to zero salary.

The second thing we did was refund every single rupee to every customer who cancelled a ticket - even before we'd received the refund from our own partners, which was a real risk.

"We'd rather go down doing the right thing than compromise on what we could live with"

Resilience and ingenuity got us through - but the real reason you do any of that is because you have the will to survive, and that comes from something bigger: purpose. For us, it was the purpose of building something bigger than ourselves, of creating impact for people. That purpose is what made us fight, and what made us live to see the next day.

Having done this for so long, and met so many people in the founder community - and even at IIT, where most of my classmates were brilliant - I've realised there isn't much correlation between raw intelligence and the ability to build something. Founders tend to have a few qualities that set them apart:

• A higher appetite for risk. Most people are naturally risk-averse; founders aren't.
• Irrational optimism - about their idea, and about their own future selves. If someone could show a founder the two decades of blood, sweat, and tears ahead of them, they'd probably never start. But founders don't see that - they only see a positive future.
• Empathy. Even before I started a company, I used to keep a list - I'd notice a problem, find a solution, write it down, and tell myself: someday I'll start a company to solve this. That list is still very long, though I've started crossing things off as they get built.
• The ability to articulate a vision. Founders are good at convincing people of what they're building - that's what excites people and motivates them to follow.

I never wanted to write a book - I genuinely thought I'd never have the time, and that it was unnecessary. But someone convinced me otherwise, and the reason I finally did it is that building a company is an excruciatingly painful exercise. Looking back, I wrote the book for my younger self - if I'd had a manual back then, I probably wouldn't have gone through so much unnecessary pain.

That's not to say you shouldn't go through pain at all - everyone needs their own painful experiences to truly learn. Resilience is built through near-death experiences, and you can't simulate those in a lab. Judgment comes from making tough calls. Instinct is built through experience. But sometimes, you don't have to learn only from your own scars - you can learn from other people's scars too. That's exactly why I wrote Made in Fire.

A company shouldn't die during a crisis just because it lacked financial discipline - that's something you can learn easily, without living through it. You shouldn't lose your health chasing a milestone. You shouldn't poison your culture just because you didn't understand how important hiring is.

"This book won't remove every fire from your journey - but it should help you avoid the unnecessary ones."

We learned almost everything the hard way in our own journey - pretty much everything that could go wrong, did - and that pain is what inspired me to write something that might help hundreds of thousands of young entrepreneurs out there.

Right now, is an extraordinary moment to be passing out of IIT Kanpur, because this is the best time in history to be a builder. I don't think there has ever been a time when a small team, armed with AI, could create something meaningful enough to impact millions of people. This is probably the biggest opportunity in the history of humanity - I've never seen a time when trillion-dollar companies get built in a matter of years; the last time it took a company that long to reach a trillion dollars, it took several decades.

At ixigo, this is exactly the mindset we bring to how we build today - using AI not as a buzzword, but as a way for a small team to move at a scale that simply wasn't possible before. My suggestion to everyone graduating today would be: go out and build something, and create an impact.

"This is the time to build. Take the opportunity and run with it - it's almost like the dot-com boom all over again. Everything is up for grabs."

Years from now, nobody will remember your CPI, or which stream of engineering you graduated from. Everybody will remember what you built - the impact you created, how you treated people along the way.
So, stay curious, and go build something that matters. Students are graduating right now at an extraordinary moment - take it, and run with it.