Nikita Dresswala
“It’s okay to fail, as long as you can get up, move on, and start building again.”
Company: Teleport
Founded in: 2022
Founder of Teleport and an avid traveller herself, Nikita Dresswala built conviction for the idea of her startup while crossing the border from Thailand to Cambodia to Vietnam on a three-week cycling journey across Southeast Asia. On top of a cumbersome pre-travel visa application process, she went through quite a bit of hassle to convince border officials to let her enter the country by road despite having all the right documents.
She realised that while there are several platforms that help with flights, hotels, itineraries and so on, there is a huge gap when it comes to applications and processes for travel visas, and the existing solutions/services are just not traveller-friendly. Teleport, a travel tech startup that aims to make travel visa applications simple and fast by simplifying paperwork requirements, providing reliable information, and offering a customer-friendly platform, aims to fill this gap.
“I always had the itch to build something. Growing up, I watched my parents run and build their own small business and when I started working, I was fortunate to get the chance to work with inspiring founders who were building ground up. And, so I was confident that I would be able to use what I’ve learnt to create something tangible of my own.”
After graduating from INSEAD with an MBA, Nikita joined Meesho as the founder’s Chief of Staff. She spent a year working on strategic and org-level priorities and then moved to a more hands-on role of setting up the Indonesia business for Meesho. For her, the experience of getting into the trenches on this zero to one journey was similar to building a new startup. She led the operations and customer experience in the country. Later, she also led another zero to one project focusing on advertising growth for SMBs in India. This four year-long stint at Meesho inspired Nikita to startup and launch Teleport.
“The larger vision is how can we make travel borderless for Indians? How can we ensure that every time you’re travelling to a new country, you travel like you belong to that place, you travel like a local, and our starting point for that is removing anxiety around travel visas.”
Starting with digitising the entire visa application process, Nikita also aims to launch other services such as insurance, forex, and e-SIMs to offer end-to-end travel solutions.
As a leader of a young startup, Nikita’s mission is to build a company with empathy; empathy for her users as well as for her team.