In December 2021, on a family vacation in Dharamshala, Anil Goteti found himself wide awake before sunrise, pacing the hotel lobby while everyone slept. After nearly a decade helping build Flipkart into the country’s largest e-commerce marketplace, he was trying to decide what to build next. “I was constantly thinking about what to build,” he recalls. “Then one morning it struck me, why don’t I build a card that rewards people for travel?”
That spark eventually became Scapia — a travel-and-credit platform anchored around a co-branded credit card with Federal Bank. Unlike typical reward cards that scatter points across categories, Scapia is built with a single objective of pushing people to travel more by letting them earn travel coins and redeem them seamlessly on flights, hotels, and experiences inside the same app. “It’s a card that sits in your pocket through the year,” Goteti says, “but the rewards nudge you to travel more.”
For Goteti, the idea wasn’t just about a product gap. It was instinctive to how he lives. He has been an avid traveller since childhood and became fluent with technology early. Born in Ramachandrapuram in Andhra Pradesh, he moved to Chennai when his father, an electronics engineer, joined HCL in its early years. The family home was one of the first in the neighbourhood to have a TV and later a personal computer. “I got my first computer around 1990,” he says. He didn’t study computer science formally, but even as a college student at IIT Madras, where he graduated in electrical engineering in 2002, he was already building a website called 15to21.com, targeting the youth.
After IIT, he went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a master’s in electrical and communications engineering. His first job at Qualcomm put him right in the middle of telecom history. “I worked on the first 3.6 Mbps call between Qualcomm and Nortel in Paris,” he says, adding that his project contributed to the chipset that later powered the first iPhone.
But even at Qualcomm, he felt the pull towards decision-making rather than engineering alone. In 2009 he enrolled at Kellogg School of Management, but before joining 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 detour to build business and strategy instincts. When he graduated in 2011, he moved back to India, what many considered a risk.
“It was probably one of the best decisions I made in my life,” he says.
Flipkart Playbook
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 also led pricing, promotions, and Big Billion Days. “I learnt how to build and scale a business from scratch,” he says. 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?”
He quit in 2020. His first startup, Proton, a SaaS product suite for SMEs, arrived during the peak funding boom of 2021. He raised around $9 million, but the product and founder fit wasn’t right. “It was a global B2B product, and I had zero B2B muscles. I’m a B2C guy,” he admits. Shutting the company down and returning the money to investors was a rare decision in that market moment, but it sharpened his instincts. “This time, I didn’t want to take money until I was sure the product worked.”
Building Scapia
Scapia therefore began quietly. For the first six months he bootstrapped it with personal capital. He and a small team spoke to users tirelessly, showing Figma prototypes, refining flows, building a travel experience around the card rather than a card around rewards. Though the company was officially registered in January 2022, the card and travel platform launched in June 2023 after more than a year of research and product development. “The day we put out the product, it was fire on social media,” he says. But the team wasn’t ready for that volume, and the next month went into scaling the customer experience to match demand.
Funding followed only after proof. Scapia raised a seed round from Z47 and Binny Bansal, then a $23 million Series A led by Elevation Capital and Bansal. The company now employs fewer than 200 people but has already built seven product categories, ranging from cards and forex to hotels, trains, and curated travel experiences.
In 2024, when Federal Bank temporarily paused onboarding due to compliance issues, Scapia turned the unexpected downtime into a product sprint. “We used that time to launch buses, trains, visas, and airport privileges,” Goteti says. In its first year of operations in FY24, the company posted revenue of `24 crore on a loss of about `88 crore. FY25 results are yet to be filed. Scapia plans to onboard multiple new banks soon.
For Goteti, now 44, the feeling isn’t of arrival but of alignment.
