ixigo, an AI-based travel app that plans the user’s trips is seeking to garner Rs.750 crore in a large fundraise and Rs.850 crore through a proposal for sale from current dealers as part of its initial public offering. This comes as a response to the company's draft pink herring prospectus filed with the markets regulator.

Founded in 2007, the AI-based travel app has a user base of over 250 million individuals.

It paid an undisclosed sum for Bengaluru-based online train discovery and booking company Confirmtkt earlier this year. Most recently, it announced that it had purchased AbhiBus, a bus ticketing and aggregation platform based in Hyderabad, on a slump sale basis.

The company soon filed for a Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRDHP) of Rs.1,600 crore.

A month prior the AI-based travel app raised $53 million (Rs 395 crore) in a pre-IPO round led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, with Info Edge Ventures, White Oak, Bay Capital, Orios Venture Partners, Trifecta Capital, and Malabar Investments also participating.

In addition, ahead of its potential initial public offering, the travel app ixigo recruited six additional independent members to its board of directors last month.

Pratap Mall, former IRCTC chairman and managing director, Arun Seth, GSF Accelerator founder Rajesh Sawhney, banking and insurance sector veteran Shubha Rao Mayya, Hopper creator Frederic Lalonde, and Hamstede Living MD & CEO Rahul Pandit are among the new members.

It raised $36 million by selling additional shares, with the remainder going toward granting its early supporters a partial or complete exit.

It’s believed that the company weighs about $ 850 million and is soon expected to launch its IPO this year.

While current investors Micromax and Elevation Capital (formerly Saif Partners) are said to depart partially through the offer for sale, another older investor MakeMyTrip has already exited the company through a secondary sale, netting 8x profits on its $4.8 million investment.

On the other hand, it’s heard that Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar, the company's promoters, are also using the IPO to reduce their stakes.

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the tourism industry in the previous 18 months. Travel and hospitality firms, on the other hand, have witnessed a resurgence, with markets such as the United States and Europe opening up as more than half of their populations have been vaccinated. In India, top airlines and hospitality companies have clocked better occupancy rates post the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 virus.