As travel portal ixigo races to get listed, the firm has strengthened its board by adding six new members who will join as independent directors, according to a release shared by the company.
The cohort joining the travel portal’s team are NASSCOM Foundation’s former chairman Arun Seth; Shubha Rao, former Vice President at ICICI Ltd; Hamstede Living’s Rahul Pandit; Co-founder of Innerchef, Rajesh Sawhney; IRCTC’s former managing director Mahendra Pratap Mall; and Frederic Lalonde, Founder and CEO, Hopper Inc.
“We are thrilled to welcome six new independent board members, bringing rich, diverse and relevant experience to our Board. Together, we will take our iconic travel-tech offerings to the next level!” ixigo’s Group CEO and Co-founder, Aloke Bajpai posted on Twitter.
Founded in 2007 by Aloke and Rajnish Kumar — computer science graduates from IIT-Kanpur, ixigo offers train, bus and flight bookings, and claims to use AI for deals, train schedule information, personalised recommendation, and PNR status, among other services.
The firm has so far raised $74 million, according to data platform Crunchbase, and is backed by Sequoia India and Elevation Capital, among other marquee investors.
During 2020, like many travel portals, ixigo also faced major setbacks. The Gurugram-based firm saw train and flight bookings completely dry up between March and May as travel came to a standstill due to lockdown restrictions.
Since then, the firm has built AI-driven travel assistant models, and also acquired Confirmtkt, a booking and train discovery platform based in Bengaluru, in February 2021.
It now looks to raise between Rs 1,500 – Rs 1,800 crore from their proposed initial public offering (IPO). The company also hired Ravi Shanker Gupta, who previously worked with Devyani Food Street Pvt Ltd, which runs Pizza Hut and KFC in India, and Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd, which runs Dominos.
