Flyzy: Giving the Goliaths a run for their money

(From left) Arjit Singh, Deepak Meena and Hansraj Patel Image: Madhu Kapparath; Directed by: Kapil Kashyap

The pandemic turned out to be an equaliser. The Davids were thrilled, and the Goliaths felt grilled, and the pupils and maestros were seated beside each other. Deepak Meena explains. “All of us were at the start line,” says the 25-year-old engineer from IIT-Guwahati. Meena, along with his co-founders, Arijit Singh and Hansraj Patel, was pivoting his fledgling maiden venture during the fag end of the second wave of the pandemic in early 2022. In March 2020, just a few days before the Covid lockdown, the friends started Flyzy to digitise the airport experience. The pandemic tailwinds helped the trio, and the engineers developed a mobile app for safe and contactless air travel, and on-boarded over 10 airports. The greenhorns managed to find four angels and Flyzy became the talk of the town.

The devastating second wave of the pandemic, though, dealt a big blow. Flyzy faced monetisation issues, the co-founders ran out of money, and there was a pressing need to pivot. In May 2022, the founding team decided to sell air tickets. The task, however, was not easy. There were Goliaths: MakeMyTrip, Booking, GoIbibo, Yatra and EaseMyTrip. But there was a silver lining: The pandemic. Battered by Covid, the travel industry was limping back to normalcy, OTA (online travel agencies) players were taking a fresh guard, and the pandemic uncertainty still hampered all revival strategies. “Big, small, not-so-big, not-so-small… all of us were at the start line,” recounts Meena. “Let’s start selling tickets,” he exhorted his team. 

The rookies set a modest target of ₹1 lakh. “We ended up doing a business of over ₹40 lakh in 20 days,” recounts Singh, who wanted to be an architect but ended up pursuing electronics engineering. “Perhaps I was the worst electronics engineer you would ever get to know… I realised this is not my calling,” he says. A few years later, came another realisation: A dominant chunk of tickets were bought by corporates. “They bought tickets worth ₹35 lakh. We found our mojo in B2B,” he says. For Patel, the third co-founder, this was indeed the ‘aha’ moment. A big fan of Iron Man movies, Patel always wanted to build his Jarvis. “Flyzy was closest to Jarvis,” he smiles.

Click here for Forbes India 30 Under 30 2025 list

Fast forward to January 2025. Flyzy’s revenues have jumped from ₹6.8 crore in FY23 to ₹70.1 crore in FY24. It’s now clocking a run rate of ₹160 crore for FY25. “We are profitable and still without institutional funding,” claims Patel.