In its pursuit to create a connected mobile services ecosystem, Micromax Informatics, one of India’s leading smartphone handset player has announced that it has made a strategic investment in ixigo, one of India’s leading mobile travel search and marketplace. Popular for its travel apps, ixigo helps Indian travellers plan their trips, find the best train and bus services, book cheapest flights, cabs, hotels and more. This investment would further reinforce Micromax’s foray into application services. It will also give ixigo a reach of over 30 million incremental users over the next year.
Talking about the investment, Rahul Sharma, co-founder, Micromax Informatics said, “Our vision is to seamlessly integrate innovative services into smart devices to create an ecosystem that is valuable for our users. We are really impressed with ixigo’s talented team and its mobile technology. We look forward to working closely with them to build on-demand and one-click travel experiences for Micromax consumers. We will be announcing more such partnerships over the next few months to accelerate our journey into services.”
Aloke Bajpai, CEO and co-founder, ixigo said, “We share a common vision of a connected ecosystem of travellers who can access and consume travel content ubiquitously on their phone and compare and book across a bouquet of travel service providers seamlessly. Around, 80 per cent of our travel and transportation queries and 50 per cent of our transactions currently originate on mobile devices. This partnership with Micromax, the leading smartphone OEM in India, will strengthen our market leadership in mobile travel services for middle class users. We expect to quadruple our mobile user-base in the next 12 months.”
Kumar Shah, head, strategy and M&A, Micromax Informatics said, “Travel and transportation is one of the most important and frequent use-cases for mobile users and we are excited to partner with ixigo to create a deeply integrated and embedded experience for our consumers. We love ixigo’s passion for making the lives of Indian travellers simpler by aggregating meaningful content and building intuitive experiences that save people’s time and money. This is our first growth-stage investment and we look forward to partnering with exciting ventures from around the world to improve the experience of Micromax consumers.”
Micromax had announced last month that it will be making investments of 0.5- 20 million dollars in over 20 startups in the coming year. For this objective, Micromax has also set up an M&A team which has been actively sourcing and working with startups across major technology markets such as Silicon Valley, Europe, Israel and India to bring in the best products and capabilities.