The acquisition gives ixigo 100% ownership of Confirmtkt in a stock plus cash deal
AI based travel app ixigo has entered into a definitive share purchase agreement to acquire 100% shareholding of Confirmtkt, a Bengaluru based online train discovery and booking platform, for an undisclosed amount across a mix of cash and ixigo stock. The founders of ixigo will join the Confirmtkt board and existing investors of Confirmtkt, including Venture Catalysts, will be exiting the company fully as a part of the deal. Both companies will continue to run independently, post this acquisition.
Train travel in India is an $8 billion market, with over 25 million passengers taking a train trip everyday, pre-COVID. Resumption of train services and relaxation of lockdown norms have led to swift recovery of reserved train ticketing to near pre-COVID levels. Both ixigo and Confirmtkt are official IRCTC B2C premium ticketing partners for online train reservations in India. This deal will help the group to consolidate its presence in Tier 2/3/4 markets with its combined user base of nearly 200 million Indians.
Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar, Co-Founders, ixigo said – “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. By leveraging our combined user base, resources, and tech expertise we will be able to enhance the experience of millions of train travellers in India every day. The combined entity will have a scale of 35 Million Monthly Active Users, and our endeavour in the coming year will be to drive faster growth and deeper penetration in the ‘Next Billion User’ segment.”
Dinesh Kumar Kotha and Sripad Vaidya, Co-Founders, Confirmtkt said – “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. 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 travellers in the times to come.”
Confirmtkt was established in 2015 by Dinesh Kumar Kotha and Sripad Vaidya. The company recorded a revenue of Rs.21.4 crores and an operating profit of Rs.1.54 crores in FY20. The app is rated 4.6 on Google Play Store and has over 20 million downloads.
