With 60K transactions in a month, ixigo secures strategic investment from Micromax
Homegrown phone maker Micromax has announced a strategic investment in mobile travel search and marketplace ixigo. ixigo helps Indian travellers plan their trips, find the best train and bus services, book cheapest flights, cabs, and hotels among others.
The Gurgaon-based company plans to use this investment for expanding its product and technology team and to add 25,000 small and mid-sized travel service providers to its marketplace offering, making ixigo the most comprehensive platform for comparing and buying travel services on mobile.
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This investment would further reinforce Micromax’s foray into application services with its affordable and innovative product offerings. Earlier, the Gurgaon-based company had invested in HealthifyMe.
Talking about the investment, Rahul Sharma, Co-founder, Micromax Informatics said,
Our vision is to seamlessly integrate innovative services into smart devices to create an ecosystem that is valuable for our users. We look forward to working closely with them to build on-demand and one-click travel experiences for Micromax consumers. We will be announcing more such partnerships over the next few months to accelerate our journey into services.
Micromax had announced last month that it will be making investments of $0.5-20 million in over 20 startups in the coming year. For this objective, Micromax has also set up an M&A team which has been actively sourcing and working with startups across major technology markets such as Silicon Valley, Europe, Israel and India to bring in the best products and capabilities.
Aloke Bajpai, CEO & Co-founder, ixigo, believes that the partnership with Micromax will strengthen the company's market leadership in mobile travel services for middle class users. He's expecting to quadruple ixigo's mobile user-base in the next 12 months.
Current traction
Aloke added,
“We are doing over five million travel queries every month and powering over 2000 transactions daily through our apps and website across flights, hotels, trains, buses and hotels. This has been growing 15-20% on a monthly basis.
The company has also reached five million app downloads this month. “Cabs is our most recent app, but we are doing over 600 cab bookings daily on app-based providers and offline taxi vendors combined, and doubling every month,” adds Aloke.
With this alliance, ixigo aims to provide relevant travel services to the next 300 million smartphone users. “For ixigo, the deal also means that our mobile user base will grow 5x in one year. 80% of our travel & transportation queries and 50% of our transactions currently originate on mobile devices," reveales Aloke.