Even as the creation of new Indian unicorn startups has dried to a trickle, an older generation of startups are graduating to become public companies.
Travel portal Ixigo is set to become the latest Indian startup to go public. Ixigo’s IPO will open on 10th June and close on 12th June. The IPO will comprise a fresh issue of shares worth Rs. 120 crore and an offer for sale (OFS) component of 6.67 crore shares.
As part of the OFS, Ixigo cofounders Rajnish Kumar and Aloke Bajpai will sell 1.19 crore shares each. Investors SAIF Partners India and Peak XV Partners will sell 1.94 crore and crore Cr shares respectively. While Ixigo is yet to disclose the price band for its public offering, about 75% of the IPO is reserved for qualified institutional buyers (QIBs), while 15% has been earmarked for non-institutional investors (NIIs). The remaining 10% of the public issue has been set aside for retail investors.
An IPO will be the highlight of a intense 17-year-old journey for Ixigo, which was founded in 2007 by IIT Kanpur batchmates Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar. The duo were working in Europe, but had decided to quit and return to start a company in India. They initially founded Ixigo as a meta search engine for flight tickets, and even raised funding from OTA operator MakeMyTrip. Over the next few years, Ixigo focused on several verticals in the travel business, including train booking apps and hotel bookings. Ixigo’s train booking apps, named ConfirmTkt and and Ixigo Trains are especially popular, and help the company stand out in what’s a very crowded space. The company also had acquired bus ticket booking platform Abhibus in 2021. Ixigo today runs a suite of travel apps, and earned revenue of Rs. 501 crore in FY23. Even more impressively, it’s profitable, having registered a profit of Rs. 23 crore in the same period.
Ixigo now appears set to become the latest Indian startup to go public. In recent weeks, companies including Digit Insurance and Awfis have comcluded successful IPOs, and have managed to have impressive listings. Ixigo had first filed for an IPO in 2021, but had later withdrawn from the process as the market had turned. These are now different times — a spate of tech companies have gone public in recent weeks — and Ixigo would hope to successfully hit the public markets later this month.