01 — At a Glance
The OTA That Broke the Internet (And Rebuilt It With AI)
- 52-Week High / Low₹339 / ₹119
- Q3 FY26 Revenue₹318 Cr
- Q3 FY26 PAT₹24 Cr
- Q3 FY26 EPS₹0.55
- Annualised EPS (Q3×4)₹2.20
- Book Value₹15.7
- Price to Book10.3x
- Dividend Yield0.00%
- Return (3 months)-35.3%
- Return (1 year)+29.0%
Auditor’s Spicy Take: ixigo fired on all cylinders in Q3 FY26. Revenue grew 31% YoY to ₹318 cr. PAT up 64% to ₹24 cr. Contribution margin hit ₹115 cr. But then the stock became a rollercoaster after being a skateboard. Down 35% in 3 months, up 29% in a year. Meanwhile, management set up an AI war room during a national airline crisis and handled 5x customer calls without breaking a sweat. This is not a normal fintech. This is a chaos-eating machine dressed up like a travel app.
02 — Introduction
You’re Not Booking Trains. You’re Booking An AI Experiment.
Le Travenues Technology Ltd, trading as ixigo (pronounced “I see you go” — yes, someone paid branding consultants for that), is India’s second-largest Online Travel Agency. Think of it as Airbnb’s scrappier cousin who actually understands Indian rail schedules and can negotiate with a bus operator in Madhya Pradesh while debugging AI code in Python.
Founded in 2007, ixigo owns three brands: ixigo (flights, trains, buses, hotels), ConfirmTkt (train seat confirmation using machine learning voodoo), and AbhiBus (buses, now a 40-50% CAGR growth engine). They also own a piece of ki Mobility (EV rental startup — because why not diversify into electric scooters while running trains).
The business model is deceptively simple: take a cut from every booking. Flights, trains, buses, hotels — doesn’t matter. The average transaction value keeps climbing. The customer base just hit 480 million annual active users. Your mother-in-law is probably one of them, researching seat 45E on the 17:30 Rajdhani for the family reunion she’s definitely attending.
But Q3 FY26 wasn’t just about hitting record numbers. India’s aviation regulator dropped a bomb in December 2025 — new duty time norms that grounded 4,500 flights in 12 days. Airlines were chaos. Passengers were screaming. And ixigo’s AI customer service system cranked up to 90% call-handling automation while refunding people faster than customers could say “thanks bhai.” The company took a ₹2 cr EBITDA hit and still grew faster than the market. That’s the story nobody’s writing about in the “AI is disrupting jobs” headlines.
Concall Context (Jan 2026): “When we take such calls, the only lens we apply is whether we are doing the right thing for our customers in that moment.” — Rajnish Kumar (Co-founder). Translation: We made ₹2 cr in bad decisions but earned ₹200 cr in customer goodwill. Do the math.
03 — Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?
Four Revenue Streams. Three Apps. One AI Army.
ixigo makes money in four ways: (1) service charges on train, flight, and bus bookings; (2) advertising on the apps and website; (3) ancillary services like travel insurance, visa processing, and car rentals; and (4) strategic partnerships with IRCTC, airlines, and hotel chains. Think of it as a financial intermediary with dreams of being a lifestyle app. Your train delay is their revenue stream.
The platforms are powered by proprietary algorithms trained on years of Indian traveler data. They predict seat confirmations on trains (ConfirmTkt’s whole thing). They forecast flight delays and offer web check-in before the airline remembers you exist. They track buses in real-time so you can watch your suffering approach on Google Maps. This isn’t technology for the sake of technology — it’s technology solving a specific Indian problem: chaos management at scale.
Q3 FY26 snapshot: GTV (Gross Transaction Value — total money flowing through) hit a record ₹4,903 cr, up 21% YoY. But that’s not all the revenue. The actual operating revenue was ₹318 cr, up 31% — because the mix of high-margin verticals (flights, hotels) is shifting within the basket. Trains still account for 43% of group GTV but only 35% of contribution margin. Flights are now “nearly as big as trains in GTV” and growing 22% YoY. Buses? Growing 36% YoY. It’s a growth seesaw.
Trains43%GTV Mix
Flights42%GTV Mix
Buses14%GTV Mix
Total MAU82 MnLatest Quarter
Revenue Mix Shift (Management Commentary): Flights revenue grew 49% YoY in Q3. Buses grew 47% YoY. Trains grew “only” 12% YoY. This is intentional. Trains are the cash cow that funds growth experiments. Flights and buses are where the margin expansion happens as they scale. Hotels? Still pre-product-market-fit. Translation: they’re still figuring it out.
💬 Have you ever used ixigo to book something and felt it was more useful than IRCTC’s website? Or did you just use it for the confirmation prediction feature?
04 — Financials Overview
Q3 FY26: The Numbers That Make VCs Weep
