Travel search marketplace, ixigo has acqui-hired Gurgaon-based Square Hoot Hikes, the parent company of Rutogo, an inter-city cabs aggregator, for an undisclosed amount.
This is the second acquisition in last one month for ixigo. Earlier it had acqui-hired ‘The Indian Backpacker’.
Founded in July 2014 by Aneesh Rayancha and Venus Dhuria, Rutogo provides an innovative, economical and interesting mode of travelling. It ensures a hassle-free, collaborative and inexpensive journey. In simple words, it helps simplify the way people commute in local and outstation trips.
As part of the deal, Rutogo’s team will be joining ixigo to scale its fast-growing cabs app by building a marketplace for inter-city taxi owners and vendors.
Commenting on the development, Aloke Bajpai, co-founder & CEO of ixigo said, “Rutogo’s team had made considerable progress in building a marketplace with nearly 100 taxi vendors across India within a few months of operation. This acquisition fits well with our overall strategy of providing comprehensive choice across intra-city and inter-city taxi booking options.”
According to ixigo, it will be launching outstation taxis in the coming weeks and will be opening up the cabs marketplace. Besides, it will also partner with other booking apps in the inter-city taxis space soon.
Venus Dhuria, co-founder of Rutogo also presented his views on the acquisition, he said “The market potential for app-based taxi booking is estimated to be worth $9 Bn and inter-city cab bookings will form a majority of that, given the higher value of such transactions. We are confident that with ixigo, we will build India’s leading cabs search marketplace with the biggest inventory of intra and inter-city cabs inside one app.”
ixigo, which launched the first Indian meta-search app for cabs on the Google Play Store a few months ago, are now developing an iOS app too, which should be out in a week’s time.
ixigo cabs app allows travelers to search across app-based taxi providers such as Ola, Uber and Easycabs within seconds and book them in one click. The app which already has more than 100,000 downloads, was earlier limited to intra-city taxis and autos transport. With Rutogo, ixigo will expand into inter-city tourist segment which fits well with its audience of travelers.
ixigo was launched in 2007 by Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar. It is a travel search marketplace, connecting more than 60 Mn travellers with content & deals from over 25,000 online & offline travel & hospitality businesses. ixigo aggregates and compares real-time travel information, prices & availability for flights, trains, buses, cabs, hotels, packages and destinations.
Earlier this year, Ola acquired TaxiForSure for $200 Mn in a cash and equity deal. Merucabs, CarzOnRent’s EasyCabs, Taxipixi etc. are other players dealing in this space.
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