Kanika Tekriwal the founder of JetSetGo India’s largest aviation company
.png)
There's a version of Kanika Tekriwal's life that was written long before she was born into it. Grow up in a Marwari household, finish school quietly, marry well, let ambition stay a private hobby. That page had no room for a girl who loved numbers, who found finance genuinely thrilling, who wanted to build something rather than marry into it.
Till the age 21 she lived according to her family. She finished school in Bhopal, went on to Coventry University in England for her undergraduate degree, and by every outward measure, stayed inside the lines her family had drawn. She was 21 before she stepped outside them.
After that she decided to start a business simple yet disruptive idea. What she stepped into was an industry with almost no women in it, and an idea that sounded faintly absurd at the time: an Uber for private jets. Buy aircraft, rent them out, and turn India's private aviation business — opaque, expensive, and clubby — into something transparent and accessible. It's the kind of idea that's easy to admire but very hard to fund in the moment, which is exactly what she found out.
Before JetSetGo could get off the ground, Kanika's own body grounded her first. She was diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkin's Lymphoma at 21 — the same year she'd chosen to bet on herself. On Shark Tank India, she later described being told by roughly forty doctors that her odds were measured in months, not years. Her response, as she's told it, was to find a doctor in Mumbai and make him a promise: they'd share a drink together forty years down the line.
Surviving cancer made me realise how short life is and that I had to start living it for myself.”
She has been candid about what survival changed in her. In a 2022 conversation with Vogue India, she said beating cancer made her understand how short life actually is — and that living it on her own terms, doing the work that mattered to her, wasn't optional anymore. Building an airline company was never going to be easy. She wanted, in her words, to “soar in the sky”.
The early years of JetSetGo were less about aviation and more about being underestimated, repeatedly, in specific and predictable ways. She was 21, a woman, alone in a boardroom full of men who'd been in the business for decades and even airport staff assumed she must be cabin crew rather than the person who owned the aircraft. She has spoken about wearing red often during that period, partly because she loved the colour and partly, one suspects, because it refused to let her be overlooked.
Fundraising was its own education. Investors wanted market-size numbers for an industry that barely had a market yet in India, and doors closed faster than she could open new ones. In retrospect, she's said, the difficulty worked in her favour it forced her to build a business that didn't depend on anyone else's belief in it. What started as an investment of roughly ?5,600 has, over the following decade, become a company valued at more than ?420 crore, built without the outside capital that's supposed to be on obligations for scale.
The numbers now speak for a business that mistrust it a while ago. JetSetGo has flown over a lakh passengers across more than 6,000 flights, and manages one of India's largest private fleets — nine jets and two helicopters, with aircraft management, ownership advisory, and membership programs layered on top of the charter business. The company is also positioning itself for what comes next in aviation, including electric and vertical takeoff aircraft.
Kanika's own recognition has kept pace with the company's. Her forward-thinking approach has earned her recognition in prestigious lists such as Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and BBC’s 100 Most Inspirational Women. She has also been honoured with awards such as the National Entrepreneurship A ward and the Women Transforming India award by the United Nations. And in 2021 she was named in India’s richest self-made woman. most recently she appeared as a judge in Shark Tank India Season 5, evaluating the same kind of pitches she once had to make herself.
What ties the story together isn't the fleet size or the net worth, impressive as both are. It's the fact that none of it was supposed to happen — not to a Marwari girl expected to marry well, not to a 21-year-old given months to live, not to a founder investor kept asking to justify. Kanika Tekriwal built JetSetGo on her own terms, and never looked back.
.png)
.png)