Artificial Intelligence-based travel app ixigo is gearing up to raise up to ₹1,800 crore through an Initial Public Offering (IPO), with the firm expected to file early papers next month.

Ahead of the IPO, the Gurugram-based company undertook a capital restructuring and increased its authorised share capital to ₹50 crore from the earlier ₹30 lakh, said sources close to the development.

The firm has appointed ICICI Securities, Axis Capital Ltd, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Nomura as bankers for the issue.

ixigo, backed by marquee investors such as Sequoia Capital India, Fosun RZ, Elevation Capital and Micromax Informatics, is expected to file the Draft Red Herring Prospectus with the markets regulator soon.

Through the listing, the company intends to give partial exit to some of its investors.

Launched in 2007, ixigo offers train, flight and bus ticket bookings. In February this year, ixigo had acquired Bengaluru-based online train discovery and booking platform, Confirmtkt, for an undisclosed amount.

Unique visitors

Post-acquisition, the company said it has been witnessing more than 37 million unique visitors every month.

Separately, ixigo has roped in Ravi Shanker Gupta as its chief financial officer and Suresh Kumar Bhutani as company secretary. Gupta had helped brands such as Jubilant Food Works Ltd in going public, while Bhutani had previously handled legal and secretarial functions for companies such as IndiGo Airlines and Ciena India during their public issues.

As of March 2021, the platform has been processing ₹5,000 crore on an annualised gross booking value, and has seen over 250 million app-downloads since inception. ixigo trains app is available in eight Indian languages – English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.

In the recent past, the company launched AI and data-driven innovations, including a completely AI-driven personalised travel assistant TARA, Siri shortcuts and an AR coach position feature, to enable passengers locate their coach positions of trains.

The travel app also launched an offline mode feature for passengers to check the running status of trains in the absence of internet connectivity. ixigo also offers news, games, videos and other entertainment offerings on its app.

For 2019-20, the company reported ₹153 crore in net revenue and ₹5.4 crore in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) loss.

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