Kitt is shutting down
On 13 December 2024 the first real flight booking passed through our system. It was ours. Four of us, booking our own trip, on a thing we had spent months building. It was my birthday. I do not think I will forget it.
Twenty months later we are shutting Kitt down.
What we built
A corporate travel platform for the GCC. Flights, hotels and cars on our own inventory, a policy engine underneath, and a transactions ledger on top that gave finance their books at booking time instead of thirty days later.
Four people, about nine months. A SAFE from KEF Holdings. Five corporate clients and roughly AED 1.5M in gross bookings.
What actually worked
We never found product market fit, so I am not going to claim the product worked end to end. It did not. These are the pieces where we knew we had solved a real problem for the person using it.
The ledger. Cost attribution moved from month end to the moment of booking. Written up here.
Everyone was already in the system. Passports, visas, preferences, loyalty numbers, and the role that set what each person could book. Anyone could book the right thing for anyone else.
Payment sat on file. No reimbursement, no expense claim, no waiting on finance to release a card for a trip leaving Thursday.
Approvals were the real decision point. Built as a compliance gate. Became the moment a company decided whether the trip was worth taking at all.
Owning the inventory. Harder and slower, but we were never explaining someone else's failure to a customer at 11pm.
Being four people. Every decision had a person attached to it.
The best feedback we ever got was one sentence.
I have stopped worrying about overspending on travel.
What did not
We ended up as a lending company disguised as a travel platform. Every travel agent in the region gives corporates a 60 to 90 day credit period. Match that or lose the deal, and matching it means carrying the float yourself. We tried, but we did not have the skills or the money to pull it off.
The war was not in our favour. We were simply not in a position to survive it.
We could not match the cheapest fare at our scale. We held our own inventory, but the price that wins a corporate travel deal only shows up at volumes bigger than the volume it takes to get there. A chicken and egg problem we did not solve in time.
We started selling too late. The classic mistake. We built something complicated enough that it took nine months before we made our first sales call.
What I underestimated: B2B sales is much tougher than it looks.
What it cost
Distance. I spent more than two years away from friends and family to build Kitt. Solving hard problems at work was something I expected. The mental strength it takes to do that alone, in a new country, was not.
Health. It took a back seat. Long hours and takeout almost every day have most certainly taken a toll.
What I am taking with me
Sell from day one. Product matters, but not so much if you cannot sell it.
Fail faster. Make the difficult decisions sooner.
Prioritise health. Productivity is higher with a healthier body and mind. Knowing that and living it turned out to be two different things.
Mentorship is one of the most undervalued things a founder can have. Learn from people who have already been where you are, and try not to make the same mistakes they did.
Would I start another company? Yes, but not soon. There is still too much to learn. Right now I am looking to take a break and focus on my health for a while before I make any decisions about what is next.
The part I keep coming back to
That first booking was four people paying for their own flights through their own software because there was nobody else to do it yet. It is the least impressive booking Kitt ever processed and it is the only one I remember the date of.
Kitt closed on 15 July 2026. If you were a customer, thank you for taking a chance on four people and a demo. I am at adarsh.panikkars@gmail.com.