Back then, people who wanted to travel to a different city had to go through a rigorous and cumbersome process of ticket booking and sorting out accommodation through offline mediums. What the country really needed was a portal that could shorten the worries of travelers through innovative travel planning products. And that’s when Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar found Ixigo in 2006.
Ixigo, through its website and numerous mobile apps, benefits the tourists to cut out of going through loads of information plus online travel contracts thus facilitating in curating a travel plan for a safe and fun experience. It basically aggregates and then compares variants like real-time travel information in terms of prices, and the availability of flights, trains, buses, cabs, hotels, packages, and destinations.
Ixigo - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Ixigo |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Gurgaon |
| Sector | Travel |
| Founders | Aloke Bajpai & Rajnish Kumar |
| Founded | 2006 |
| Parent Organization | Le Travenues Technology Pvt. Ltd. |
| Website | ixigo.com |
About Ixigo and How it Works
Founders of Ixigo and team
How was Ixigo Started?
Ixigo - Business Model and Revenue Model
Ixigo - Name, Tagline and Logo
Ixigo - Competitors
Ixigo - Funding and Investors
Ixigo - Growth
About Ixigo and How it Works
Ixigo.com is India's leading online plus mobile travel search plus planning website. A one-stop solution for travelers, it aggregates as well as compares the finest deals on hotels, flights, buses, train plus packages, and reviews the best travel facts from through 100+ travel websites to provide the most reliable travel information, all on one portal.
Accessible on Google Play Store, it’s train app is rated 4.3 stars, by more than 1 lakh users. The unbiased exploration results plus the user-friendly interface has lead it to be one of the leading travel websites in India.
The company has a lot of subsidiary applications like Ixigo trains, Ixigo Flights and many more. One of which is known to let the brands spread out to train travelers contextually along with aiding them to determine apps plus deals which are pertinent to them, through advertisers' crossways e-commerce, hyperlocal service, online travel plus food-delivery. Their Trains application furthermore allows its consumers to select the option of booking intercity ride-sharing through BlaBlaCar, if trains for a particular destination are inaccessible or if tickets are on the waiting list.
Also read: MakeMyTrip - Success Story, Founder, Business Model, Funding, Revenue, News
Founders of Ixigo and team
Rajnish Kumar and Aloke Bajpai are the founders of Ixigo.
- Aloke Bajpai, CEO & Co-founder - Graduated from IIT- Kanpur, Aloke was a Vice President at Final Quadrant Solutions before launching Ixigo in 2006. He has also been the CEO and Co-founder of Travenues.
- Rajnish Kumar, CTO & Co-founder - Like his co-founder, Rajnish is also an IIT Kanpur graduate and the CTO and Co-founder of Travenues. Before Ixigo, he was a Technical Architect at Amadeus IT Group.
How was Ixigo Started?
The idea started when Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar left their high paying jobs in Europe and returned to India in 2006 fully geared up to follow their dreams. They rented a studio apartment in Gurgaon and set up their workplace. For a year, they worked through no salaries. Over their persistence, Ixigo was born.
The only passion behind the company was the vision to build a product to help Indian travelers search and compare hotel information in one place, online and make their lives relatively easier. Ixigo was launched in a nascent online travel segment that has since thrived into one of India's most viable companies.
Relevant read: Goibibo - India's number 1 online travel booking portal.
Ixigo - Business Model and Revenue Model
Ixigo’s business model is compatible with an airport's requirements since it allows an unbiased comparison of all the available choices, aiding the travelers in deciding which website they should book through, rather than hanging midway in the deal.
Besides, the innovative features, for example, the 180-days fare viewpoint, direct booking of airline tickets through the website and the feature-rich hotel exploration mechanism make this portal tremendously user-friendly. Ixogo’s meta-search business model associates travel contracts from 100+ travel sites and have aided millions of explorers to save time and money on their trip.
In April 2016, Ixigo also launched a meta-search application for cabs, which was initiated to generate revenue for the company. As an extension to revenue generation, the company also has an in-app booking alternative that will permit users to book on their website itself using a third-party power-driven app.
Also read: Pickyourtrail – Now Vacation Planning is a Breeze
Ixigo - Funding and Investors
Ixigo has raised a total of $52 Million in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised in April 2020 from a Series B round.
Here is a list of all the funding till date:
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2008 | Seed Round | $500K | BAF Spectrum |
| August 2011 | Series A | $18.5 Million | SAIF Partners, MakeMyTrip |
| June 2015 | Funding Round | $4 Million | Micromax |
| November 2016 | Venture Round | $10 Million | Sequoia Capital India |
| March 2017 | Series B | $15 Million | Sequoia Capital India, Fosun RZ Capital |
| April 2020 | Series B | $4.6 Million | Amar Ujala Limited |
Ixigo has acquired Reach App on Jan 11, 2017.
Ixigo - Name, Tagline and Logo
Ixigo's tagline is 'Know & Go', which indicates that as a traveller, you must know some background information about a place before you reach there
Ixigo - Competitors
Ixigo has a whole lot of competitors in the market. Starting from a private application like MakeMyTrip, GoIbibo to government applications like IRCTC train booking, the market is filled with online booking and transactions facilitating portals. With it indulging in both conveyance and accommodation, the range of competitors it faces, gets doubled.
Ixigo - Growth
- Connects over 80 million travelers
- Has 12 million monthly active users
- Extracts deals from over 25,000 online as well as offline partners
- It generates more than 1 billion train PNRs every month.
- 2 lakh scores and appraisals of trains and stations
- Records 35 billion user assemblies monthly
- Records 225 million screen-visions every month
