Skift Take
Who understood that 2021 would be the year of travel IPOs?
Sean O’Neill, Skift
Ixigo, an online travel and transit booking app, has actually filed papers with Indian regulators to raise $200 million (1,600 crore rupees) via an intital public offering.
The Gurgaon-based online travel business on Thursday exposed its plan to issue new shares worth almost $100 million (750 crore rupees) and sell equity shares of a little more than $100 million from existing shareholders, the documents said
MakeMyTrip, India’s largest online travel group, sold its stake in the start-up, the business exposed in monetary filings today. The creator of MakeMyTrip, Deep Kalra, has resigned from Ixigo’s board. MakeMyTrip Group got $33 million, net of deal expenses, for its investment stake. That was approximately eight times the worth of its original $4.8 million financial investment.
Currently, cofounder and CEO Aloke Bajpai holds a 9.18 percent stake in the company, co-founder and chief item and technology officer Rajnish Kumar holds 8.79 percent, SAIF Partners owns 23.97 percent, and Micromax has a 7.61 percent stake in the company, officially known as Le Travenues Innovation. Each of those investors, who together currently hold 49.55 percent of the business, will quit some equity to raise money for the business.
Ixigo’s co-founders CEO Aloke Bajpai (left) and primary product and innovation officer Rajnish Kumar at the company’s Gurgaon, India, headquarters. Source: Ixigo.
New Phase for Ixigo
GIC, the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, led a round announced last month of $53 million in funding.
Ixigo began in 2007 as a price-comparison, or metasearch, engine. It now lets travelers book trains, flights, intercity buses, hotels, and taxis, while likewise supplying research tools.
However rail has been the business’s most recent engine of growth. The start-up’s diversity into domestic travel and travelling made it more stable during the crisis, and the business didn’t lay off any employees in the pandemic.
Ixigo turned modestly lucrative throughout the 12 months ending in March 2021.
Its app continues to be used by countless Indians every day, the company stated. It had a 42 percent market share of consumer-facing reservation channels for train ticketing in India in the very first half of this year, according to India’s state train.
This month the start-up obtained bus focused app AbhiBus. The business didn’t disclose the value of the sale, paid for with a mix of money and Ixigo stock as factor to consider. Ixigo is planning additional mergers and acquisitions.
In 2014, Ixigo’s co-founders fine-tuned business model, launching a different app for information on intercity trains in India. It later included ticketing for trains plus cross-selling for buses, cabs, hotels, and flights.
Since around 2017, Ixigo’s rail app has actually crowdsourced intel about countless cell towers in the nation and after that triangulated where any offered mobile phone user was in relation to those points based upon the last-received signal travel energy tools and services established using in-house proprietary algorithms and crowd-sourced info.
The company has actually since made a similar offering for intercity bus service. with info such as bus running status. It has actually also used destination material and travel alerts.