How Ixigo Turned India’s Most Frustrating Travel Experience Into A ₹655 Crore Business

The year was 2010, and booking a train ticket in India was a lesson in patience no one had signed up for. You would open the IRCTC website at exactly 8 AM, fight the queue alongside half a million other people, watch the server crash three times, and then discover that the berth you needed in the third AC coach on the Rajdhani had somehow vanished before your fingers could hit confirm. If you were lucky, you would eventually get a waitlisted ticket and spend the next two weeks refreshing a page nobody had made easy to understand, watching a number that was supposed to drop but rarely did, fast enough or at all.

This was not a niche problem. It was the daily reality of hundreds of millions of Indians trying to move around a country where rail is not a travel option but the travel option, the backbone of how ordinary people get from one city to another, from one life to the next.

Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar had watched this closely. Both were IIT Kanpur alumni. Both had spent years working at Amadeus, the global travel technology company, in Europe, where flight and rail booking systems were built with the kind of precision and user consideration that the Indian traveller could only imagine. They saw, clearly and specifically, what was missing. Not just a better booking interface, but a layer of intelligence that helped a traveller understand their options, predict what was likely to happen to their waitlisted ticket, and make confident decisions about how to get where they needed to go.

In June 2007, they returned to India and founded Ixigo.

Built For The Traveller Nobody Was Building For

The founding premise of Ixigo was not, as it might appear from the outside, simply to build another online travel agency. The market already had MakeMyTrip and Yatra. What it did not have was a platform built specifically for the Bharat traveller, the first-time flyer from Tier 2 cities, the railway commuter managing a complex multi-leg journey on a budget, the student trying to figure out whether the Tatkal quota was worth paying for.

The early product was a flight metasearch engine, aggregating prices across booking websites rather than selling directly, giving travellers a transparent view of what was available before committing to a platform. The hotel search followed in 2008. But the real inflection point arrived in 2014 when Ixigo launched its train ticket booking app, a move that took the company into a category with a scale of demand no other vertical in Indian travel could match. India’s railways carry approximately 23 million passengers every single day. The market for tools that make that experience less painful was, in the most literal sense, enormous.

The train apps became the company’s defining product. ConfirmTkt, which Ixigo acquired in February 2021 in a cash and stock deal, had built a proprietary PNR prediction algorithm that told waitlisted passengers their probability of getting a confirmed berth. AbhiBus, acquired in August 2021, extended the ecosystem into bus ticketing, adding another mode of travel to a platform that was increasingly positioning itself as the end-to-end travel companion for the Indian mass market.

“We didn’t expect this kind of growth to continue post-COVID,” Aloke Bajpai admitted in an interview following the IPO, “but the numbers have exceeded our expectations.”

The Numbers Behind The Journey

Between the founding and the IPO, Ixigo raised approximately $72 million across 7 funding rounds, from investors including SAIF Partners, MakeMyTrip, Sequoia Capital India, Fosun RZ Capital, and Peak XV Partners. The path to public markets was not linear. The company filed its DRHP in 2021, withdrew it in 2022 as market conditions shifted, refiled, and eventually listed on the NSE and BSE on June 18, 2024.

The IPO was priced at a band of ₹88 to ₹93 per share, valuing Ixigo’s parent entity, Le Travenues Technology at approximately ₹3,500 crore. The stock opened at a significant premium to the issue price, reflecting strong institutional and retail interest. Thanks to strong institutional and retail demand, the stock debuted at a stellar pop, opening at ₹138.10 on the NSE, a roughly 48% premium over its issue price. Both co-founders entered the listing with substantial stakes (Aloke Bajpai with 3.08 crore shares and Rajnish Kumar with 3.22 crore shares), each netting approximately ₹100 crore from their respective offer-for-sale tranches.

The transition from a high-growth startup to a disciplined public entity reflected immediately in the bottom line:

• FY24 Performance: Closed with revenue of ₹655 crore and a net profit of ₹73 crore.
• FY25 Growth: Total operating revenue scaled further to ₹914.2 crore.
• FY26 Milestones: Delivering its strongest full-year performance post-listing, ixigo reported Revenue from Operations of ₹1,228 crore (up 34% YoY) alongside an Adjusted EBITDA of ₹120.9 crore and robust operational cash flows surging 60% to ₹195.7 crore.

What Ixigo Is Betting On Next

Bajpai and Kumar have been explicit about where the company sees its next decade of growth. India is on the cusp of a structural travel boom driven by a growing middle class and rising discretionary income, featuring an estimated 400 million potential travellers who have never booked a flight, a hotel, or a long-distance bus ticket through a digital platform.

That number, 400 million, is the real market Ixigo is building toward. Not the Tier 1 urban traveller who already has MakeMyTrip on their phone and a corporate travel account at a larger OTA, but the first-time digital booker from Lucknow, Patna, or Coimbatore who needs a product that speaks their language, works on a modest data connection, and integrates modern generative AI utilities (such as its conversational AI planning agents and automated voice assistance scaling across millions of user queries).

“In FY26 we achieved 34% revenue growth and 28% Adj. EBITDA growth YoY,” Bajpai and Kumar noted in a joint corporate statement. “The next phase of our journey is all about reinventing our organisation as well as customer experience by putting AI at the core.”

Nearly two decades after two IIT Kanpur alumni sat in Europe and decided they needed to come home to fix a broken system, ixigo stands tall as a publicly traded powerhouse. The IRCTC queue is still long, but for millions of Indians stepping onto trains, buses, and flights, ixigo has quietly become the most sensible way to navigate it.