The travel OTT space has seen many startups coming and going. Only a handful survived, and IXIGO is one of them. Bored from doing mundane jobs, and not getting dream roles after finishing their studies, Alok Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar had started their new venture in 2007. Twelve years down the line, IXIGO, a company the two founded, is turning profitable. Startup Street talked to the co-founders about their journey, the pivots, and on their financials.

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Kumar said: "When we started we were a pure play meta search and back in the days desktop was the primary source from where we used to get our traffic and business was easy because you just compare prices , redirect to multiple websites and it was a very leveraged business."

There weren't much challenge but then over a period of time what happened is that mobile became a huge platform and 2013 onwards the company realised that, he told CNBC-TV18.

"So we started focusing more on mobile as a platform and we built multiple apps. Our strategy was that we felt that app was a use case and every use case deserved an app and that was the thought process behind it."

"With that thought process we built multiple apps and soon we realised that not all of them kind of grew and became big but there is one app which became really big which was catering to the train audience."

Over a period of time what we realised was that we ended up with two different apps and now we call them two different travel apps which are catering to two different target audiences, Kumar added.

"One of the apps, which was our flight centric app, became the app which is targeting mostly the previous 100 million users and the second app which was the trains oriented app it is what became the app for the next billion users."

He further added that the next billion users need a new kind of user interface and a lot of people have talked about voice but that it is more about multi-experience and not just about one user interface.

"It needs to be like a blend of multiple user experiences and we are kind of building something like this in that space so watch out for that, something that would be a combination of voice and visual."

First Published:Feb 20, 2020 8:52 PM IST