About Koolee
We started with a suitcase on a subway staircase.
Anyone who has hauled a month of luggage up the stairs at Court Square, or folded a stroller with one hand at a curb on Canal Street, knows the worst part of flying happens before the airport. We built Koolee to delete that part.
The idea is simple
A vetted Koolee agent comes to your door, verifies your ID against the booking, weighs and seals your bags with a numbered, tamper-evident tag, and sends them to the airport in a tracked vehicle. You can follow their journey in your Koolee timeline as we deliver them directly to your airline's bag drop before its cutoff. You check in online as usual, skip the bag-drop line, and head straight to security.
We're not a storage service, a shipping company, or a travel agency. We do one thing: take your checked bags from your door to your airline's bag drop — carefully, securely, and in plain sight.
The hardest question we get is the right one: “Why would I trust a stranger with my bags?”
Our answer isn't a slogan. It's a process you can see: vetted agents, tamper-evident seals, a photo at every handoff, and a live timeline from your doorstep to the airline bag drop. You never have to take our word for it. Every step is visible, documented, and trackable.
The founders
Built by two people you can name
Two founders, personally accountable for every bag we carry. No layers between you and the people who built this.
Karun Rathi
Co-founder · Strategy, Partnerships & Growth
Karun leads Koolee — driving strategy, finance, partnerships, pricing, and growth.
A Kelley School of Business grad and former NCAA tennis player, he's worked in logistics at Fonterra, one of the world's largest dairy cooperatives, automated workflows as a Business Intelligence Analyst at Indiana University, built one of the first collegiate esports clubs in the U.S., and started an airport shuttle business in his college town before Uber Shuttle existed. Now he's putting that experience to work at Koolee, simplifying complex logistical challenges into seamless experiences.
Track record
- Kelley School of Business
- Fonterra · logistics
- Indiana University · BI analyst
- Collegiate esports club
- Campus airport shuttle
- Koolee
Tarun Dadlani
Co-founder · Technology & Product
Tarun leads Koolee's technology — the booking flow, the app your agent brings to your door, the live timeline, and the custody record beneath all of it.
This is his second healthcare platform as a founding engineer; before Koolee he built the booking, payments and practice systems behind a dental-care platform, and earlier, security dashboards for the analysts watching for attacks. The instinct never changes: a lost record is not an acceptable outcome. Every hand-off on your trip writes an entry that can be added to, never edited or deleted — including by him.
Track record
- IEEE-published research
- DNIF · SIEM dashboards
- Mindstix · enterprise React
- Stevens Institute · MS CS
- HealthXchange · founding engineer
- Koolee
The record
Nothing about your trip can be quietly edited later.
Every hand-off writes one entry: who had your bags, where, when, and the photo taken at the time.
Entries can be added. They cannot be changed or removed — not by an agent, not by our operations team, not by us. If we get something wrong, the correction goes onto the record next to the mistake and you see both. The timeline on your trip page is not a summary we prepared for you; it is the same record we work from.
A correction, on the record
- Bags verified & sealed at your doorTue 10:05 AM2 bags · seals NYC 000481, NYC 000482 · photos attached
- Correction · seal read again as NYC 000483Tue 10:11 AMappendedThe 10:05 entry stays exactly as it was written. This one sits next to it, and you see both.
- Delivered to your airline's bag dropTue 11:48 AMPhotographed at the counter
Our agents
The backbone of our whole operation
Everything about Koolee depends on who rings your doorbell. So that's where we set the highest bar.
Identity, verified
Every agent's government ID is verified before their first shift, and every pickup is tied to a named, accountable agent on our side.
Background-checked
Agents pass a criminal background check before joining, period. There is no fast lane around it.
Trained on the protocol
ID check, weigh, seal, photograph — in that order, every time. Agents train on the sealed-bag protocol and are audited against it.
Accountable on the record
Every hand-off an agent makes is photographed and timestamped. Good behavior isn't a promise here; it's a log.