Ibibo Group, the Indian online travel venture, announced that it has received an investment of $250 million from South African internet and media company Naspers.
The investment is expected to focus on improving Ibibo's standing in the Indian hotels category and on additional technology innovations.
Ibibo is already backed by Naspers, as well as Chinese internet heavyweight Tencent.
The fresh investment reportedly has upped Naspers stake in the company to 90 percent.
"Our objective is to solve problems for the transportation and accommodation providers and to connect them to the travellers. The commitment from both Naspers and Tencent to ibibo is a testimony to the strength of our platforms and the opportunities ahead," said Ibibo's founder & CEO, Ashish Kashyap.
The group which owns integrated online travel properties such as hotel booking portal Goibibo.com and bus ticketing service redBus.in says that it has processed more than 6.5 million transactions for the third quarter of 2015. It claims that is generating more than 2.5 times the transaction volumes of its nearest competitor.
In a recent research report by Morgan Stanley, Goibibo was slotted in at the first place by hoteliers across a number of parameters, including booking volumes, confirmed bookings, last minute bookings, backend and IT support, as well as insights and market intelligence.
The group's most valuable property, Goibibo hotel bookings surpassed 1.6 million room nights during Q3, up 400% YOY with mobile contributing to 71 percent of the bookings in the month of December 2015, up from 42 percent a year ago.
Naspers Group CEO, Bob van Dijk said, "The Indian e-commerce market, and the online travel segment, in particular, offers exciting growth prospects for us as a group. With a talented, proven management team and exceptional technology, Ibibo is well positioned to benefit from an increasing number of people using online travel services going forward".
In January, rival MakeMyTrip had raised $180 million from Shanghai-headquartered travel service provider Ctrip.
BW Reporters
Simar Singh is one of the youngest members of the BW team. A fresh graduate from IIMC, she also holds a degree in political science from LSR. She enjoys covering power, startups, lifestyle and a little bit of tech.
