ixigo acquires Rutogo

ixigo, India’s mobile travel search marketplace has announced that it has completed the acquisition of Square Hoot Hikes, the parent company of Rutogo, an inter-city cabs aggregator, for an undisclosed amount. As part of the deal, the Rutogo team will be joining ixigo to scale its fast-growing cabs app by building a marketplace for inter-city taxi owners and vendors.

Aloke Bajpai, Co-Founder & CEO, ixigo said - “Rutogo’s team is passionate about the tourist taxis segment and they 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. 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 inter-city taxis space shortly. With flights, trains, buses & cabs, we are now the most comprehensive transportation search in India.”

Commenting on the deal, Aneesh Rayancha, Co-founder, Rutogo said - “ixigo shares our vision of becoming the leading marketplace for local & outstation cabs. We are quite enthusiastic about joining forces with the most innovative mobile business in the travel & transportation category”. Venus Dhuria, Co-founder, Rutogo, added - “The market potential for app-based taxi booking is estimated to be worth $9 billion, 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.”

A few months earlier, ixigo had launched the first Indian meta-search app for cabs on the Google Play Store. 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. With over 100,000 downloads as of date, ixigo cabs is now the fastest growing app in ixigo’s portfolio, and is set to debut on iOS in a week’s time. The app was earlier limited to intra-city taxis and autos transport, and with Rutogo, ixigo will expand into the inter-city tourist segment which fits well with its audience of travelers.

This is the second acquisition in the last one month for ixigo, which earlier announced that it had acqui-hired ‘The Indian Backpacker’. Micromax, India’s leading smartphone manufacturer recently invested in ixigo to bundle travel services natively into their new range of Android phones, a move that will help ixigo go from its 6.5 million monthly active users to over 30 million monthly active users by the end of 2016.