Ixigo buys train booking app Confirmtkt to serve India’s $8B rail market

Ixigo is taking ownership of Confirmtkt, an Indian online train discovery and booking platform founded in 2015, for an undisclosed amount of cash and Ixigo stock. The two companies will continue to operate independently.

The deal aligns with the Indian online travel agency’s decision in 2019 to focus on flights, trains and buses. Ixigo says prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 25 million people took train trips every day in India, making it an $8 billion market.

Now, as lockdowns are being lifted and train services resuming, the companies say reserved train ticketing is near pre-COVID levels. Together Ixigo and Confirmtkt have a combined user base of nearly 200 million people in India.

“Ixigo and Confirmtkt founders both share the passion and focus to grow the train utility and ticketing space. Confirmtkt has built an innovative and high growth company with a great product-market fit and laser sharp focus on train related use cases,” says Ixigo founders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar in a statement.

“By leveraging our combined user base, resources and tech expertise we will be able to enhance the experience of millions of train travelers in India every day. The combined entity will have a scale of 35 million monthly active users, and our endeavor in the coming year will be to drive faster growth and deeper penetration in the ‘next billion user’ segment.”

The founders of Ixigo will join the Confirmtkt board and existing investors of Confirmtkt, including Venture Catalysts, will exit the company as a part of the deal.

“We started Confirmtkt with a vision to change the way people book train tickets in India and made it a hassle-free experience. We are happy that we were able to build a motivated, tightly-knit team, and we grew rapidly to become one of the leading train ticketing startups in the country,” says Confirmtkt founders Dinesh Kumar Kotha and Sripad Vaidya in a statement.

“We are excited to now join hands with Ixigo, whose team and products have created new benchmarks in the travel industry. We remain committed as a team towards our joint vision of serving the underserved market segment and to become the first transactional touchpoint for millions of Indian travelers in the times to come.”

In a Twitter thread posted Wednesday, Bajpai says Ixigo saw 35% year-over-year revenue growth in its FY2020 (April 2019 through March 2020) and total FY2020 revenue is “greater than the total primary capital we have raised to date” – which Crunchbase lists as $35.5 million.

Bajpai says the success traces back to “three transformational decisions” the company made in mid-2019: focusing on organic and product-innovation led growth instead of discounting, becoming a full-service online travel agency and getting back to “the frugal mindset we began with.”

That was also when Ixigo cut verticals in order to focus on flights, trains and buses. In March 2020, Ixigo took a minority stake in smart bus startup GogoBus. In July 2020 Indian airline and air cargo operator SpiceJet acqui-hired Travenues, an Ixigo subsidiary that developed airline e-commerce solutions.

Launched in 2007, Ixigo uses artificial intelligence to help users find personalized recommendations, deals, airfare predictions, train delay information and automated customer service.