How former Pinterest engineer Mohak Nahta is building travel's AI concierge

A visa hiccup that once stopped Mohak Nahta from taking a work trip has evolved into a much larger ambition: building what he hopes will become an AI-powered concierge for global travellers.

Nahta, a former software engineer at Pinterest, started Atlys in 2021 after struggling with the cumbersome visa process while working in San Francisco. What began as a tool to simplify visa applications has since grown into one of India's most scalable travel technology startups, processing visas at a run rate of 60,000-70,000 a month and recording more than 11-fold growth over the past 18 months.

"Visa is the first among many sources of friction and uncertainty in travel," Nahta, founder and CEO of Atlys tells Fortune India. "Our goal is to eliminate friction and uncertainty from global travel."

That ambition is steadily expanding the company's scope beyond visa applications. Nahta envisions Atlys as an AI-powered travel companion that can anticipate problems, file compensation claims for delayed flights, ensure travellers have the right insurance coverage, manage compliance paperwork and eventually coordinate multiple aspects of an international trip.

While online travel agencies made travel bookings easier, they also fragmented the travel experience. "Any given trip today involves 15 or 16 different apps. Travel has become a project," says Nahta. "People didn't dislike the convenience of a travel agent. They disliked the inefficiency and lack of transparency."

His answer is what he calls "DIY 2.0" where travellers retain the transparency of self-service platforms while AI handles the cumbersome tasks traditionally performed by travel agents.

At the centre of this strategy sits visas, which Nahta describes as a unique source of customer identity and intent data. Unlike a flight booking, a visa application reveals detailed information about a traveller's plans, family situation and preferences, allowing AI systems to provide more personalised assistance.

The market opportunity is sizeable; India sees roughly 30 million international travellers annually, growing at 20% YoY. Atlys currently handles about 700,000 visas a year, translating into an estimated 2-3% share of its addressable market.

According to ROC filings, the company recorded operating revenues of ₹31.84 crore (~ $3.8 million) for the financial year ending March 31, 2025 (FY25). This marks a 3.3x increase from the ₹9.61 crore (approx. $1.15 million) recorded in FY24.

Atlys has raised nearly $73.4 million so far, including a $36 million Series C round led by Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital in March 2026, with participation from MakeMyTrip which plans to route visa demand through the platform.

Building trust before growth

While the company has scaled rapidly, Nahta argues that growth has come from obsessing over customer experience rather than aggressive expansion. Around 65-70% of customer acquisition today is organic, driven largely by referrals and repeat usage. For every 100 customers who use Atlys, more than half return within a 12–15 month period.

"We make money on the first transaction itself," says Nahta. "We're not acquiring users at a loss and hoping repeats make up for it later."

Atlys is not yet profitable at the company level as they are focussed on "doubling, tripling on R&D to build the best product". "After marketing we're actually profitable, but then a lot of what sits below marketing are just fixed costs," shares the young founder.

The company has also focused heavily on reducing uncertainty, a major pain point in visa processing. Its internal on-time delivery metric, which measures visas delivered within the promised timeline, has improved from 71% in 2023 to 97% today. Its "perfect orders" metric, measuring applications completed without any customer support intervention, has climbed from 24% to 73% over the same period.

Atlys also uses predictive models to reduce visa rejections before applications are even submitted. About 20% of users are proactively flagged before checkout if the company's systems determine they are unlikely to receive approval.

"If we believe you're not going to get a visa, we're very upfront," says Nahta. "We sacrifice revenue every day by blocking people and telling them what they need to fix first."

The approach, he says, helps keep rejection rates below broader industry levels while saving customers time and money.

Purposefully, artificial intelligence is deeply embedded throughout the business in a company of 352 employees. Internally, employees use AI agents for workflows and decision-making. On the customer side, AI now resolves roughly half of all support chats. The company has also built tools such as AI-powered mock interview preparation for US visa applicants.

Even as geopolitical tensions, changing visa policies and government systems remain beyond its control, Nahta believes transparency is becoming a competitive advantage. The company publishes an annual transparency report detailing what worked, what failed and where improvements are still needed.

"Visas sit on top of government systems where outcomes and timelines aren't always in our control," he opines. "When something goes wrong, the frustration is real. The only thing we can do is be transparent and keep improving."

For now, Atlys may be known as a visa platform. But if Nahta succeeds in his vision, visas could end up being just the doorway into something much larger: an AI-powered operating system for international travel.