Gurugram-based travel marketplace and hotel booking firm Ixigo is in talks with several investors to raise around INR 539 crores ($75 million) in a series C round of funding, as per a VCCircle report.
Sequoia Capital and Fosun International will participate in the round. The travel aggregator also said that it is in talks with a number of US-based and China-based investors to raise the additional funds.
If the deal goes through, the fresh capital will be used to boost research and development, innovate new products and increase aggressive brand marketing.
Founded by Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar, the firm enables customers to plan their travel with an aggregated platform. Ixigo aggregates information from numerous travel websites and provides deals across travel, buses, trains, cabs, flights and hotels.
The rail ticketing platform accounts for around 20% of its revenue and the firm is looking forward to ramping it up to 50% by 2020. The travel marketplace has more than 100 million users across the platform and 21 million monthly active users.
“In FY 2017-18, we did GMV of $100 million, and in the year before that (FY 2016-17), we had done $25 million. Next year, we should comfortably exceed $500 million,” Aloke Bajpai, CEO of Ixigo.
Earlier in March last year, the firm has raised INR 109 crores ($15 million) in series B round of funding from Sequoia Capital and Fosun International. Ixigo has raised more than $35 million across all funding rounds till date. MakeMyTrip and SAIF Partners are among its backers.
Other travel aggregators competing with Ixigoa are Skyscanner, Trivago and Expedia. In August 2011, ixigo received $18.5 M investment from SAIF Partners and MakeMyTrip in a landmark deal for online travel in India. In June 2015, smartphone maker Micromax Informatics invested an undisclosed amount in ixigo. Ixigo posted INR 69 crores in revenue in September 2018 which is growing at 200 per cent.
