[Funding Alert] Travel-tech Start-up ixigo Invests in Inter-city Mobility Startup gogoBus According to ixigo, the investment will help the company disrupt the bus travel market

With growing digitization, traveling now seems easier than ever. The online disruption in travel-tech space has removed the need of seeking help from travel agents and paying them a fortune to get their plans sorted by allowing users to book tickets online to choosing their seat in the plane to booking hotels for a stay using their mobile phones.

Several players in the travel-tech space have been ramping up their efforts to race to the top position in the space. In a recent development, AI-based travel app ixigo invested an undisclosed amount in Gurugram-based premium smart bus platform, gogoBus.

According to an official statement, ixigo's investment is a part of gogoBus's first round of funding. Other prominent angel investors including Rajesh Sawhney (co-founder and CEO, Innerchef) and Abhishek Sharma (COO, Dineout) also participated in the round

Plans For The Fund

gogoBus was founded in January 2020 by Amit Gupta and Avinash Singh Bagri. The full-stack mobility start-up has an asset-light model with interconnected standardized brand new buses, self-operated lounge, pre-defined pickup points, and a strong in-house tech platform for booking, tracking and in-bus safety features.

Gupta explained that gogoBus offers several features including customized reclining luxury seats, GPS-enabled buses, predefined pit stops and trained, verified and uniformed drivers to give an exemplary experience to all bus travelers.

With this investment, gogoBus has launched operations on multiple routes in north India and will be expanding its product and technology team. "Our aim is to set new standards when it comes to comfort and safety in bus travel," Gupta said.

The start-up claims to have covered more than 500,000 km within one month of its launch.

Why This Deal Makes Sense For ixigo

Founded in 2007, ixigo uses artificial intelligence for deal discovery, personalized recommendations, dynamic marketing, airfare predictions, infrastructure cost optimization, business intelligence and providing fully-automated customer service.

Ixigo, which has a user base of over 170 million travellers, aims to disrupt the bus travel market with this deal.

"The bus market in India is quite attractive with over 5 billion bus trips a year. The gogoBus team's prior operating experience with buses, domain knowledge of travel and transportation, coupled with ixigo's demand-side scale will help disrupt the bus travel market in a big way," Rajnish Kumar, co-founder and CTO of ixigo said in the statement.

Explaining further about this deal, Aloke Bajpai, co-founder and CEO of ixigo, said while buses are one of the most popular means of inter-city transport in the country, the market is highly fragmented and non-standardized with many pain-points which need to be solved.

Bajpai added that travellers often end up planning a last-minute inter-city bus trip due to the lack of availability on trains and high flight fares. gogoBus allows people to do this in a smart and affordable manner.