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From one-room office to Dalal Street debut: Ixigo CEO shares ‘then vs now’ pics
Ixigo CEO Aloke Bajpai's “how it started” vs “how it's going” post is viral.
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Ixigo co-founder and CEO Aloke Bajpai shared two pictures to show how far the travel booking platform has come as it made its stock market debut on Tuesday.
Shares of Le Travenues Technology Ltd, which operates ixigo, on Tuesday ended with a huge premium of over 78 per cent against the issue price of ₹93. The company's market valuation stood at ₹6,275.87 crore.
Ixigo’s Dalal Street debut is the culmination of nearly two decades of hard work for the company’s co-founders Aloke Bajpai and Rajnish Kumar, who started the travel booking platform out of a one-room office - as evidenced by the throwback photo that Bajpai shared on social media yesterday.
(Also read: Ixigo CEO lauds Decathlon employee who is a professional ultra-cyclist)
The photograph, captioned “How it started…,” shows Bajpai and Kumar in front of two desktops during the early days of ixigo. The two IIT-Kanpur batchmates had launched the travel booking platform in 2007. Bajpai followed up this picture with a more recent one taken during ixigo’s stock market debut. “How it’s going,” he captioned the picture, taken during the bell ringing ceremony.
Take a look at the post below:
According to a Forbes piece published in December 2023, Bajpai returned to India in 2006 after a four-year stint at Amadeus in Europe. He launched ixigo with Rajnish Kumar in June 2007.
However, the company failed to secure funding from VCs that year. “Forget funding, I don’t think you will ever make money or grow big,” one VC told the dejected founder of ixigo.
In this case, at least, the VC was proven wrong as ixigo made a stellar stock market debut on Tuesday. The stock started the trade at ₹135, rallying 45.16 per cent from the issue price on the BSE. Later, it zoomed 74.18 per cent to settle at ₹161.99.
(With inputs from PTI)
