Travel gear startup Escape Plan has secured $25 million in Series A funding led by existing investor Jungle Ventures, with participation from Fireside Ventures and IndiGo Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of IndiGo Airlines, which has entered the company as a strategic investor.
The company plans to deploy the fresh capital primarily toward accelerating offline retail expansion, strengthening supply chain and pricing capabilities to reach lower price points, and expanding its footprint beyond the top 25–30 percent of India, co-founder and CEO Abhinav Pathak said. Additionally, Escape Plan will invest in technology to improve product availability and consistency across channels while also expanding into adjacent travel categories.
“Once we started hitting meaningful scale, the idea was to start building new territories, new categories, and new geographies,” Pathak said. “That was the intent of the fundraiser. We’re still a very lean team, so we also wanted to double down on building the organisation the right way.”
Notably, the Series A round comes less than a year after Escape Plan raised $5 million in seed funding, which Jungle Ventures led with participation from Fireside Ventures in July last year, just two months after the company began operations.
Importantly, both Jungle Ventures and Fireside Ventures doubled down on their investments in the Series A, while IndiGo Ventures joined as a new strategic investor, reinforcing confidence in the company’s long-term vision.
Meanwhile, Pathak highlighted the speed of the fundraising process. “From the first conversation to money in the bank, it took hardly two to two-and-a-half months,” he said.
Founded by Pathak & Abhinav Zutshi, Escape Plan positions itself not as a single-brand luggage company but as a platform-led travel products business. Accordingly, the company operates across online marketplaces, direct-to-consumer channels, and a rapidly growing offline retail network.
Currently, Escape Plan runs at an annualised revenue rate exceeding Rs 300 crore, driven largely by luggage sales across channels. At present, the company operates more than 25 offline stores, serves 6–7 lakh customers, and ships around two lakh pieces of luggage every month, according to Pathak.
While luggage remains the company’s largest revenue contributor, Escape Plan has started expanding into softer travel categories, including travel accessories such as neck pillows and passport covers. “Over the next six months, we’ll bring all possible travel categories under Escape Plan,” Pathak said. “Today, we are very luggage-first, but that will change.”
Significantly, Escape Plan plans to allocate a large portion of the Series A capital toward scaling its physical retail presence, with a long-term target of 200-plus stores.
At the same time, Pathak emphasized that the company aims to unlock markets where pricing constraints or limited physical presence previously restricted growth.
“Today, we are restricted to the top 25–30 percent of India by geography,” he said. “The goal is to start playing in 90 percent of India. That means pulling multiple levers—pricing, stores, e-commerce penetration, and marketing.”
Despite the company’s rapid momentum, Pathak acknowledged the structural challenges of the travel gear market, which typically grows at inflationary rates and remains dominated by long-standing incumbents.
“Once you hit Rs 300–500 crore in revenue, you become a meaningful part of the category,” he said. “From there, growth becomes harder, and mistakes become very expensive.”
Ultimately, Escape Plan is betting on category-led, platform-style ownership, rather than a single-brand D2C approach, to build long-term defensibility in the travel gear market.
“Everyone else is building brands. We’re building a platform,” Pathak said. “Like Decathlon for sports or Lenskart for eyewear, we want to solve for every travel need, across price points and geographies.”
Escape Plan’s $25 million Series A round marks a pivotal step in its ambition to become a platform-first travel ecosystem in India. By combining aggressive offline expansion, pricing-led market penetration, and category diversification, the company aims to scale beyond niche urban markets and establish itself as a pan-India travel essentials platform, while leveraging strategic partnerships to build long-term competitive advantage.
