Hardeep Singh
INTRODUCTION
We all have some of the other ways used many ticketing e portals to ease our journey and IXIGO needs no introduction in that. A platform that almost all of us have been using for years, IXIGO is one of those startups that needs no introduction.
Ixigo is one of the most well-liked Facebook pages among Indian Internet companies. It has 1.1 million followers and its content has reached over 60 million people worldwide.
In the wake of Paytm, CarTrade, Nykaa, PolicyBazar and MobiKwik, Ixigo is the latest firm to join on the IPO bandwagon. The enormous Zomato offer, which at the time of the listing ordered a value of Rs 65,000 crore, laid the scene for other digital companies in India.
According to a red-herring prospectus filed with the regulatory body on capital markets (DRHP), ixigo plans to raise Rs 750 crore through primary fundraising and Rs 850 crore through an Offer-for-Sale as part of its maiden public offering (OFS).
On Thursday afternoon, the DRHP received a Rs 1,600 crore boost. ET examined a copy of the document. The cofounders, Rajnish Kumar and Aloke Bajpai, also intend to sell their interests through the IPO, according to the drawn prospectus.
Last month the firm secured $53 million, including the participation of the Info Edge Ventures, the White Oak, The Bay Capital, Orios Venture Partners, Trifecta Capital and Malabar Investments, in a pre-IPO round led by Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, GIC.
While existing investors Micromax and Elevation Capital (previously Saif Partners) will exit in part through an OFS, MakeMyTrip, a prior investment firm, has already exited the company in a secondary sale, making an 8x profit on a $4.7 million investment.
EARLY DAYS
IXIGO was founded by two friends, Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar, who met during their study at IIT Kanpur, where they worked together from 1997 to 2001 with the Madrid based travel giant Amadeus.
When the two came back to India, they started to produce a unique product based on a user-friendly method of meta-search. The aim was to create something more efficient than was available at now. It took a whole year to construct the product, and the developers lapsed money to keep the company floating.
At a period of few start-up events and discussion forums, the knowledge regarding Ixigo was propagated by word of mouth at a conference called Proto. in. During its 7th month of operation, the site was subject to 100,000 organic visitors without publicity.
Only 20-25 million Internet users connected to their desktop PC through telephone in India. Following a series, A funding round in 2011, in which Makemytrip participated, Ixigo, which was started in 2007 as a booted meta-search service, evolved to a tour planning player.
The firm intended to push this funnel to the point where clients were browsing for and booking holidays, thus the trip layer was included in the design.
Ixigo gradually introduced features like “viewing locations” and “doing things,” which generated a substantial amount of traffic from search engines on their own. Ixigo employed several SEO optimization methods to maintain the site’s content on the first pages before it became a common occurrence.
MARKETING STRATEGY
Other providers, such as MakeMyTrip and Cleartrip, work in a completely different way from Ixigo. ixigo does not handle ticket bookings and instead refers visitors to the service provider’s website, even though these websites provide books for plane and rail tickets, as well as hotel reservations.
FUNDING
Ixigo has submitted documents with the market regulators Sebi to generate Rs 1,600 crores via an IPO, supported by the AI services Sequoia Capitalis, Elevation Capitals, and Micromax.
REVENUE AND LOSSES
Ixigo made a profit of Rs 7.5 crore in FY21, compared to Rs 26 crore losses in FY20, and losses of Rs 138 crore, up from Rs 112 crore in FY20.
ACQUISITION
The online rail travel aggregator Ixigo located in Gurugram bought Confirmtkt based in Bengaluru in February this year.
The company announced the purchase of Confirmtkt in cash and Ixigo stock combination at an unrevealed amount. Both companies will remain autonomous, ixigo informed in the news, however.
Confirmtkt was founded in 2015 by Dinesh Kumar Kotha and Sripad Vaidya. The company made Rs 21.4 crore in revenue and Rs 1.54 crore in operating profit in FY20.
FUTURE PROSPECTS OF IXIGO
Ixigo’s goal of becoming India’s premier mobile travel firm is obviously in line with the company’s key strengths in the product, technology, and content. The prospect that Ixigo would become India’s largest travel service provider platform excites me the most about this chance.
We help small and medium-sized travel companies use technology to enhance direct sales and reach it’s constantly growing mobile client base.
Perhaps, a startup that came into existence to make travelling easy for people and now it is entering IPO will surely be a wise scene to see. In India where every second big company was a startup once, what change IPO brings in the proliferation of the company be a good watch until then.
