Expert opinion · June 28, 2026 · Nikita Khandheria
The first thing people usually notice about Nikita Khandheria is not that she owns event venues. It is that she almost never says no.
That instinct has shaped her career from the beginning.
Long before she owned venues, Khandheria worked as an event planner, helping clients celebrate weddings, product launches, nonprofit galas, milestone birthdays, and corporate gatherings. Again and again, she watched the same conversation unfold. A client would describe an idea they had imagined for months, only to have it dismissed because the venue would not allow it. Sometimes the ceiling could not support the installation they envisioned. Sometimes open flames were prohibited. Sometimes the venue simply preferred to keep things the way they had always been.
Eventually, she stopped asking how to work around those limitations and started asking a different question. What would happen if the venue itself was designed to encourage ambitious ideas instead of preventing them?
That question became ERIA.
Founded by Khandheria, ERIA is an experiential hospitality company that plans and produces luxury weddings, corporate events, brand activations, nonprofit galas, and private celebrations while owning and operating the venues where many of those experiences take place. By combining hospitality, production, and venue ownership under one company, ERIA has created a model that gives clients considerably more creative freedom than they would typically find in traditional event spaces.
The approach has produced projects that rarely fit into a single category. One client learned to fly a plane so he could surprise his wife by piloting her to a birthday celebration. Another wanted a wedding that felt as though guests had stepped onto a tropical beach, so the venue was transformed with imported sand and custom-built scenery. For another celebration, Khandheria worked with designers in India to create a one-of-a-kind wedding dress because nothing available on the market reflected the bride's vision. Corporate clients have entrusted ERIA with product launches that transformed entire venues into immersive environments where architecture, sound, projection, lighting, and hospitality all became part of the story the brand wanted to tell.
To Khandheria, none of those projects are memorable because they were expensive. They are memorable because they began with curiosity rather than limitation.
She often says that extraordinary experiences begin with someone asking, "Do you think this is possible?" Her job is to answer that question with thoughtful planning, relentless execution, and a willingness to solve problems that most people would avoid.
That philosophy extends well beyond hospitality. Before founding ERIA, Khandheria built businesses in other industries, experiences that taught her how to think about operations, finance, negotiation, and long-term growth. She has since applied those lessons to hospitality, building ERIA into one of the Bay Area's fastest-growing experiential event companies and expanding from one venue to three locations in less than two years.
Despite the pace of that growth, Khandheria believes the company's greatest advantage has very little to do with events.
It is trust.
Clients do not hire ERIA because they expect every event to unfold perfectly. They hire ERIA because they trust the team to solve problems before those problems ever become part of the guest experience. Vendors arrive late. Equipment fails. Weather changes. Performers cancel. Those challenges are inevitable in hospitality. Khandheria believes the measure of an event company is not whether those moments occur, but whether guests ever realize they happened.
Her ambition is often described in terms of growth, but she describes it differently. She wants to build places that become part of people's personal histories. A wedding venue is remembered because a family began there. A corporate event matters because a company launched its next chapter there. A fundraiser matters because lives were changed in that room. The buildings themselves are important only because of what happens inside them.
That idea continues to shape the future of ERIA. As the company expands into new markets and acquires additional venues, Khandheria's objective remains the same as it was on the day she founded the business: to create places where people never have to compromise on the moments they will remember for the rest of their lives.
