The country’s top online travel
agency MakeMyTrip Ltd has acquired assets of Mygola.com for an undisclosed
amount and the entire Mygola team has joined MakeMyTrip as part of the deal. The
acquisition is done through the NASDAQ listed company innovation fund, which was
formed to invest in startup or early stage companies in travel technology
space.
Mygola, founded by IIT Batch mates
Bapna and Prateek Sharma in 2009, claims it can help travellers create custom
trips in 15 minutes. Its app, which is present in 16 cities across the world,
has up to 5,000 installs on the Google Play store on Android. Mygola mobile app
uses technology to curate content, videos, open/close hours, tips from
travellers, panoramic views all on a massive scale and specific to individual
user taste. The acquisition could potentially give MakeMyTrip a greater
foothold in the mobile space.
Since users book everything from
attractions to restaurants and cabs from within the app, the company makes
money through a commission every time a transaction happens. For restaurant
booking it charges $1 per diner and between 5 and 10 percent from cabs etc. It
also charges 5 percent from end users as convenience fee. In the original model,
Mygola used to generate revenues from users asking questions besides earning a
commission for bookings.
The acquisition comes at a time
when the Indian travel sector is heating up, having received $71 Million in
funding so far in 2015, mostly in early stage and seed funding, as opposed to
$55 Million in all of 2014. Helion Venture partners, who led the $1.5 Million
round in 2013 for Mygola in October, were also an investor in MakeMyTrip. Prior
to that, Mygola had raised $1 Million from the US based accelerator 500
startups, Blumberg capital.
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