ixigo Refiles DRHP For IPO, Slashes Fresh Issue Size To INR 120 Cr

Online travel aggregator (OTA) ixigo’s parent Le Travenues Technology Ltd refiled its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on Wednesday (February 14).

As per the DRHP, the startup’s initial public offering (IPO) will comprise a fresh issue of INR 120 Cr and an offer for sale (OFS) component of 6.66 Cr equity shares. 

SAIF Partners India (now Elevation Capital) Peak XV Partners, Micromax Informatics and cofounders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar are among the investors who will sell shares via OFS. 

The startup would use INR 45 Cr from the IPO proceeds for its working capital requirements.  Of the remaining, INR 26 Cr will be deployed to ramp up its tech stack and scale up investments in data science, artificial intelligence, among others.

The funds raised from the IPO will also be used for general corporate purposes and to shore up inorganic growth via acquisitions.

Founded in 2007 by Bajpai and Kumar, ixigo is a traveltech platform that earns revenue from the sale of various travel and related services including air, rail and bus tickets. It also earns income from offering advertising services on its platform.

The startup has raised nearly $88 Mn in funding in the past 15 years from names such as Peak XV Partners, Singapore’s GIC, InfoEdge, Elevation Capital, Fosun RZ, among others. It last raised $53 Mn at the height of the funding boom in 2021.

It competes with the likes of EaseMyTrip, MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, and Yatra. 

ixigo’s IPO comes at a time when the traveltech startup has undertaken a slew of cost cutting measures over the course of the past year to spruce up numbers. In a chat with Inc42 last year, cofounder Bajpai talked about ixigo’s frugality playbook and said that its zero-dollar marketing approach has paid off immensely when it comes to profitability.

Banking on post-pandemic growth and its frugal approach, the company crossed the INR 500 Cr operating revenue revenue mark in the financial year 2022-23 (FY23), up 32% year-on-year (YoY).

Not just this, the OTA also clocked a net profit of INR 23.4 Cr in FY23 as against a loss of INR 21.1 Cr in FY22.

As per the DRHP, ixigo has already notched up an operating revenue of INR 491 Cr in the nine-month period ended December 2023. Its profit stood at INR 65.7 Cr in this period as against INR 18.7 Cr a year ago.

This is the company’s second attempt at a public listing. It first filed DRHP for an INR 1,600 Cr IPO in 2021. However, ixigo shelved its public listing plans due to negative macroeconomic environment as market volatility and funding winter dried up capital and battered new-age tech stocks. 

With the filing of the DRHP, ixigo has joined a growing list of Indian startups that are looking to go public. In the past couple of months, big-ticket names such as Ola Electric, FirstCry, MobiKwik, and Snapdeal-backed Unicommerce have filed their IPO papers with SEBI.

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