The biggest promise that the Internet brought was access to content anywhere and anytime, so 'Why should airfare booking be any different?' This thought gave birth to Mystifly back in 2009.

Ten years on, the business, which started as an India-based B2B airfare marketplace to provide a corporate travel solution to TMCs and SMEs domestically, is a very different animal.

For starters, it’s no longer an India business. In 2016, it took in US$5 million funding from a Japanese powerhouse, Recruit, and this year, CEO & founder Rajeev Kumar took on a Chinese co-CEO Mary Li, in a strategic move to further grow its Global and Chinese business, and giving it a blended leadership culture embracing Indian, Japanese and Chinese influences.

Li was the founder & COO of the first data-driven travel technology company in China, ASLAN, whose data products were used by most travel agencies. In 2013, she sold ASLAN to Alitrip and she became head of air tickets for the Alitrip. After she quit Alitrip, she went on a two-year world expedition before joining Mystifly.

“The biggest challenger to our business was emerging China – Alitrip, Ctrip – they were executing faster than us. I’ve known Mary for eight years. She knows scale and she’s seen scale. When we say 10,000 international transactions a day in India, we think it’s big in India because there are not that many that can generate that using your own tech but in China, that’s small.

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