Some consolidation in the travel space. Ixigo, the online travel search engine, has acquired Rutogo, a Gurgaon-based intercity cab aggregator for an undisclosed amount. This is Ixigo’s second acquisition in the past one month, with the travel startup acquiring backpacking startup The Indian Backpacker last month.
As a part of the deal, Rutogo’s team will join Ixigo in order to scale up its cabs app along with helping the company in building a marketplace for intercity taxi owners and vendors. Ixigo recently launched a meta search app for cabsm which allows riders to search across app-based taxi providers such as Ola, Uber and Easycabs.
The app was earlier limited to intra-city taxis and autos transport. But, with this acquisition, it will expand into the intercity tourist segment. Rutogo is currently operational in Delhi-NCR and Chandigarh.
Rutogo was founded in May 2015 by Aneesh Rayancha and Venus Dhuria. It is a marketplace where taxi vendors from across the nation are connected under a single platform and customers can choose an operator based on various parameters like price, availability and the rating of the operator.
Aloke Bajpai, co-founder and CEO of ixigo, said,
This acquisition fits well with our overall strategy of providing comprehensive choice across intra-city and intercity taxi booking options. We will be launching outstation taxis in the coming weeks, and will also be opening up the cabs marketplace and partner with other booking apps in the intercity taxis space shortly.
Ixigo was founded in 2007 by Rajnish Kumar and Aloke Bajpai. It claims to have 6 million users every month with over 4 million downloads across apps. Its investors include SAIF Partners and MakeMyTrip.com.
Micromax also made a strategic investment in the company through which it is planning to reach over 30 million monthly active users by the end of 2016.
