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May - 2014 - issue > Venture Beat

Online Travel Service Yatra Raises Rs.140 Crore

SI Team
Saturday, May 3, 2014
SI Team
Online travel portal Yatra.com raises Rs.140 crore from IDG Ventures and Vertex Venture Management in addition to the participation of existing seed investor Norwest Venture Partners (NVP). In the year 2012, it raised around Rs.88 crore from Valiant Capital Management, and existing investors including NVP and Intel Capital. Prior to this, the company raised Rs. 200 crore in 2011. With this round, the company has raised a total Rs.757 crore since 2006.

The latest funds will be deployed to increase their brand presence, strengthen their position in domestic holidays, increase hotels supply, and improve its mobile front by enhancing the features and product offering and also to strengthen the execution capabilities. Founded in 2006 in Gurgaon by Dhruv Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra, the online travel services company provides information, pricing, availability and booking facility for domestic and international air travel, hotel bookings, holiday packages and bus and railway reservations.

Since flights contribute to 70 percent of their revenue, they expect to improve in hotels and packages which contribute to the remaining 30 percent. Also they plan to expand their inventory and reach out to at least 25,000 domestic hotels by 2015. Yatra is enthusiastic to grow its mobile presence, since over 20 percent of the total traffic and 15 percent of flight bookings come from mobile.

IDG’s experience with other online companies in India and China made Yatra confident that they will bring a lot of synergies and experience that would help it to strengthen its position in the OTA space. All their brands together would account for 27 to 30 per cent of the OTA market.

In 2012, Yatra had acquired hotel aggregator Travelguru from Travelocity, which is a key part of its hotels strategy and it is investing aggressively online to grow the business. It is also looking to acquire few companies and the company could spend between Rs.6 crore and Rs.120 crore for future purchases.
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