In October, Prosus invested over Rs 1,800 crore in Ixigo. The investment, made in two rounds, makes the Dutch investment group the largest external investor in the homegrown online travel aggregator and earns it a 15% stake and a board seat. This was also its first foray into a publicly listed Indian company.
It’s a rare occurrence given that private-equity and venture-capital firms typically invest in private companies and pocket gains through secondary sales or their public listing. What’s not rare, though, is Prosus’ love for Indian travel-tech firms.
Back in 2010, Prosus, then called Naspers, invested in the online travel firm Goibibo. By February 2016, Naspers owned as much as 90% stake in Goibibo. Later that year, market leader Makemytrip acquired the company, and three years later, Naspers exited through an equity-swap deal with the Chinese travel agency Ctrip.com.
Years later, Prosus has taken an interest in the travel-tech space again—thanks to an outlier like Ixigo. The 18-year-old company has been on a tear, growing its revenue by over 8X to Rs 914 crore in the five years to FY25. In the latest earnings call, Ixigo said it’s been growing faster than the market for at least five quarters.
Ixigo was not always the travel aggregator it is now. Like the Ship of Theseus, it’s been rebuilt, piece by piece—first a search tool, then an information curator, now a full-fledged booking platform. Its CEO and managing director, Aloke Bajpai, doesn’t mind the comparison; after all, the ship is sailing.
“We didn’t even call ourselves an online travel aggregator for most of the time we existed,” Bajpai told The Ken on a late-night phone call from Abu Dhabi. Despite that, industry stakeholders believe Ixigo has what it takes to climb the ladder in travel aggregation.
The problem, though, is that travel-tech is a segment that has fewer investors, courtesy of the challenges the model comes with, according to Adarsh Menon, partner at early-stage venture fund Fireside Ventures.
“For a customer who travels two or three times a year, a travel aggregator has to be on top [of their game] throughout the year. So one can imagine the kind of marketing money that would need to flow in to get customers on board, which negatively impacts unit economics,” he added.
Still, with Prosus on its side, that’s something Ixigo seems ready to fight. But step one of taking a heavyweight down is to trace their footsteps.

Tiny Steps, Big Dreams
Prosus might be betting on Ixigo, but Ixigo has long been betting on India. The company figured out early that India doesn’t travel like the West.
“For any Indian, the first port of call for travel is usually booking a train or bus ticket,” said Bajpai. “That’s how India travels today.” Just about 4% of Indian travellers fly, he adds—and Ixigo built itself for the other 96%.
That may sound obvious now, but it wasn’t in 2007 when most online travel startups were copying the Western model. Expedia began with flights, then expanded to hotels. Makemytrip, Yatra, and Cleartrip followed the same path. Ixigo, short on capital, couldn’t afford that playbook.
“Indian companies built trust historically by investing heavily in sales, marketing, and discounts. We couldn’t raise much in our early days, so we couldn’t follow that playbook,” Bajpai said. “Instead, we built our own.”
The company began as a search engine for customers to compare prices of different airlines and online travel aggregators. Soon, it saw an opportunity in helping travellers plan their itinerary, helping them with the what, where, and how of their travel. It didn’t take much time for Bajpai and his team to figure out that most customers spent a lot of time tracking the status of their tickets and trains.
Ixigo eventually launched train-ticketing services in 2017, and slowly expanded to buses, airlines, and now hotels.
That’s something Prosus found distinct about an Ixigo customer as well. Almost 94% of its transacting customers travel beyond metro and tier-1 cities, according to the company. They’re also the ones making their first online travel booking, so the way they behave is different.
“They have a lot more anxiety… so, you need to do a lot of handholding, in terms of the product and customer support,” said Gaurav Kothari, principal at Prosus Ventures. As of September, Ixigo has nearly 80 million monthly active users.
In fact, more than half the customers booking air tickets on Ixigo are first-time flyers, the company claimed. Perhaps that’s a trait Prosus is looking for in companies.
The investment group first backed e-commerce firm Meesho in 2019, and then went on to support several of its later funding rounds. As much as 80% of Meesho’s 150 million annual-transacting customers are from tier-2, -3, and -4 cities.
Kothari refused to comment on Prosus’ previous investments, but admitted that it is “long” on India’s consumption story. It did not have a travel company in its basket, and so, the investment in Ixigo “fit right”, he said.

To Fly or Not to Fly
Air travel contributed 60–95% of Makemytrip, Cleartrip, and Easemytrip’s gross booking value in FY24, per data from travel and hospitality consultancy Videc. For Ixigo, it made up just about one-third the share.
The product, technology, and prices are usually the same for all online travel aggregators. And since margins are “very low for highly penetrated categories like domestic air travel, the smarter move was to focus on rail and buses—where the competition was low,” said Ankit Sawant, founder of Onarrival, a B2B travel tech platform.
Air bookings attract 1–4% margins, much lower than hotels’ 7–10%. For train bookings, the margins are even lower, at less than 1%.
But from the perspective of Prosus, it had already missed making sizable gains in Makemytrip. Between December 2016 (after Makemytrip acquired Goibibo) and April 2019—when it stayed the largest external investor in the listed entity before exiting—Makemytrip’s market cap more than doubled to about $2.4 billion. But in the five years that followed, the NYSE-listed company got the most of the post-pandemic travel boom—its market cap jumping over 5X to nearly $12.6 billion.
Now, the investment in Ixigo is a chance for Prosus to redeem itself in the Indian travel-tech space, said a travel-industry executive with over a decade of experience, including in Makemytrip.

Ixigo is the only travel-tech player that can challenge Makemytrip
Prosus appreciated how frugally, and in a capital-efficient way, we have been building and solving real customer pain points,” said Bajpai. “Another area of alignment was our entry into hotels—one of the most profitable segments in travel—where we see an opportunity to bring the right supply and create differentiated experiences.”
That said, Ixigo is a late entrant to the party. It has lost the momentum its rivals got when air travel jumped post-pandemic. It was only after its listing in June 2024 that the company doubled down in the air-ticketing segment. That vertical accounts for about a third of Ixigo’s revenue today.
Even so, Ixigo’s market share in the segment has gone from 5% in FY24 to about 10% now, per data from the company and Videc. In the online train-booking segment, too, Ixigo has seen its market share jump from 53% in FY24 to 60% as of the June 2025 quarter.
In the June quarter, Easemytrip’s revenue dropped 23% from a year ago to Rs 120 crore. Separately, there has also been a major reshuffle in its leadership.

Hotel Booking: A Different Game Altogether
Ixigo wants to tread the beaten path. Its next move is to double down on hotel bookings.
Makemytrip, which holds about two-thirds of the online hotel booking market, gets about half its revenue and profit from this segment, per the company’s latest investor presentation.
In terms of penetration, hotels, at large, are at about 20%. Its penetration in budget to medium hotels is even lower at 10–12%. That’s the category Ixigo wants to disrupt.
Entering the segment is tricky. Companies partner with the state-run platform IRCTC for train bookings, and a few airlines like Indigo and Akasa for air tickets, but hotels are a much more fragmented space,” said Arun Dudee, chief product and technology officer at Tripjack.
Alternative accommodations—the likes of Saffron Stays, Elivaas, and Stayvista—have opened up a latent source of supply to Indian lodging. Add to that the difficulty of digitising hotel listings in an app, given that the page needs to capture all the features of a room.
Yet, travel aggregators want to lean toward hotel bookings because air travel, where they earlier made a fortune, is facing its own challenges, according to Jain.
The share of online travel aggregators in the domestic air-travel segment is higher, but it’s a lean commercial model with online intermediaries making these sales a wafer-thin margin product. International air travel is more rewarding, but online travel aggregators’ shares here are lower compared to offline agents.
Low-cost carriers want to own and cross-cultivate their customers through loyalty and engagement. For instance, Indigo launched its own loyalty programme called Bluchip, which offers points for redeeming in future journeys, and discounts on certain seats.
Such programmes make it imperative for travel aggregators to hedge the high contribution of flights in their gross booking value.
Ixigo, though, is back to square one, again. Its business looks nothing like it was when it started, again.
“Our what may have changed, but the how of using the tech remains the same,” said Bajpai. “Even if it takes another 18 years to crack it open.”