ixigo booked the purchase of ConfirmTkt at ₹94.8 crore in early 2021. Within twelve months the company it had bought posted ₹14.3 crore of net profit on ₹128.2 crore of revenue, which means the acquirer paid less than one year of the target’s sales for a business that was already earning an 11% net margin. That is not how Indian consumer-internet acquisitions usually go, and the numbers sit in ixigo’s own audited filings rather than in a press release.
The stranger part is what came before. ConfirmTkt was a free waitlist-prediction tool that took a year to launch, spent its first twelve months with no revenue model at all, raised roughly $330,000 in its entire independent life, and entered the year Indian Railways suspended passenger trains as a company that sold nothing but train tickets. It grew revenue 74% that year. This is the story of how a two-person side project from an IBM flat in Bengaluru became the engine of India’s largest train-booking OTA, and what it cost the people who built it.
Quick facts
| Company | ConfirmTkt, operated by Confirm Ticket Online Solutions Private Limited until its amalgamation into Le Travenues Technology Limited (ixigo) with effect from 1 April 2023; continues as a separate consumer brand |
| Founded | Website launched 5 July 2014 in Bengaluru; company incorporated 2015 |
| Founders | Dinesh Kumar Kotha (CEO, ixigo Trains and ConfirmTkt) and Sripad Vaidya (COO, ixigo Trains and ConfirmTkt) |
| Businesses | Train waitlist-confirmation prediction, IRCTC-authorised train ticket booking, alternate-route suggestions, assured-refund products, plus cross-sold flights, buses and hotels |
| Latest standalone revenue | ₹171.3 crore in FY23, the last year before the merger (restated figures in ixigo’s FY24 annual report) |
| Latest standalone profit | ₹19.7 crore net profit in FY23 (same source); the merged train segment earned ₹511.3 crore revenue in FY26 |
| Listed | Not separately. Parent ixigo listed on NSE and BSE in June 2024 at an issue price of ₹93 |
| Market value / last valuation | Acquisition consideration booked at ₹94.76 crore (2021); parent ixigo market capitalisation ₹6,916 crore (about $720 million) on 25 September 2026 |
| Key shareholders | 100% owned by ixigo since FY24; Kotha and Vaidya each held 2.12% of ixigo per the February 2024 DRHP |
What they do
ConfirmTkt sells confirmed train seats to people who have been handed a waitlisted ticket by Indian Railways. The app predicts the probability that a waitlisted or RAC ticket will clear, suggests alternate trains, break-journey combinations and bus-plus-train routes when it will not, and lets the user book the reserved e-ticket inside the app as an IRCTC-authorised principal agent rather than being bounced to the IRCTC website. Its customers are overwhelmingly reserved-class rail travellers from Tier II, III and IV towns, with historic strength in South India, as JM Financial’s January 2025 initiation note put it. Since 2021 the app has also cross-sold ixigo’s flights, AbhiBus buses and, more recently, hotels.
The origin
Sripad Vaidya and Dinesh Kumar Kotha met as colleagues and flatmates at IBM in Bengaluru. Vaidya, from Bodhan in Telangana, held a computer-science degree from SASTRA University and worked as a business analyst; Kotha, an electronics engineer from NIT Jamshedpur, was a full-stack developer who had also spent time at o9 Solutions. Vaidya travelled the Bengaluru to Hyderabad route most weekends and festivals, rarely found a confirmed seat, and kept paying bus fares instead. He noticed that waitlists on the same train cleared in recognisable patterns, tried predicting them by hand, and found that his guesses held up.
The pair had already failed once. Their first product, Meterup, went nowhere, and in 2012 they were juggling three ideas at once before dropping two of them to focus on train prediction, as Kotha recounted in a July 2020 Medium post marking six years of the company. The insight was modest and specific: Indian Railways publishes enough historical booking data that confirmation odds can be modelled per train, per class, per quota, per day of week and per season. The founders spent 22 months gathering that data by hand before any machine learning was applied, according to Entrackr’s September 2018 profile. The website went live on 5 July 2014, an Android app followed on 30 August 2014, and the product started with prediction accuracy of around 78% before climbing past 88% by mid-2015 and past 90% by 2016, as reported by Inc42 and Voice&Data at the time.
The struggle years
The first problem was that ConfirmTkt did not sell anything. In July 2015 Inc42 described a team of eight with 1.8 lakh downloads, 15,000 daily active users and, in its own words, no revenue model; monetisation was something that would arrive when booking was integrated. Bookings still happened on IRCTC’s site. Users loved the tool, with 95% of app traffic recurring, but love did not pay salaries.
The second problem was capital, or its absence. An angel round led by Pravin Agarwala, a former SAP Labs India vice-president, came in 2015. Venture Catalysts and a handful of angels, including Anirudh Damani and Urrshila Kerkar, put in $250,000 in January 2016. That was essentially it. By September 2018 Entrackr counted total funding at about $330,000 and noted that competitors had already closed Series B rounds while ConfirmTkt was still planning a Series A that never closed. For four years the company ran on 16 people, 8 lakh downloads and 50,000 daily users, numbers Voice&Data reported in September 2016, while better-funded travel apps bought their users.
The third problem was the pivot itself. Turning a free utility into a transaction business meant becoming an IRCTC principal agent, building payments, refunds and customer service, and persuading users who trusted the app for predictions to trust it with money. By September 2018 ConfirmTkt was doing 2,700 ticket bookings a day against 60,000 unique PNR predictions a day; revenue split 40% advertising and 60% transactions, and the founders were talking about reaching 10,000 daily bookings by December. Three-month retention of 28% against an industry average of 18% was the asset that kept the company alive.
Then the trains stopped. Indian Railways halted passenger services from 23 March 2020, initially until 14 April, as PRS Legislative Research documented at the time. For a company whose entire revenue was reserved rail tickets, the top line went to zero overnight and stayed near it for weeks. Reserved ticketing recovered towards pre-Covid levels by mid-2020 as special trains resumed, and by early 2021 ixigo’s Aloke Bajpai was pointing to about 1.5 million reserved-ticket passengers a day. ConfirmTkt had closed FY20 with ₹21.4 crore of revenue and ₹1.54 crore of profit, per filings cited by Inc42 in February 2021. Remarkably, it closed FY21, the lockdown year, at ₹37.2 crore of revenue, up 74%, according to ixigo’s FY22 annual report. It was profitable, growing and structurally unable to raise the money that would let it compete alone.
The turning point
On 31 January 2021 ixigo signed a share purchase agreement for 50.1% of Confirm Ticket Online Solutions Private Limited, paying approximately ₹17.9 crore in cash plus a ₹6 crore non-compete fee, and consolidated the company from 17 February 2021. The public announcement on 4 February 2021 said only that it was a cash-and-stock deal for 100%, that Venture Catalysts was exiting fully, and that both apps would run independently with ixigo’s founders joining the ConfirmTkt board. ixigo’s later audited accounts fill in what the announcement did not: total purchase consideration of ₹94.76 crore, made up of ₹17.96 crore in bank transfers, ₹6 crore for the non-compete, ₹39.77 crore of shares to be issued and a ₹31.03 crore liability for the future acquisition of the remaining stake. Of that price, ₹81.70 crore was booked as goodwill and only ₹8.12 crore as identifiable intangibles, meaning ixigo was paying for users and a brand, not code.
Look at the numbers on either side of that date. In FY21, the year of the deal, ConfirmTkt’s revenue was ₹37.2 crore, so ixigo paid about 2.5 times trailing sales. In FY22, the first full year inside the group, revenue rose 244.3% to ₹128.2 crore and profit after tax was ₹14.25 crore, per the subsidiary statement in ixigo’s FY22 annual report. Combined, ixigo and ConfirmTkt held more than 42% of the OTA train-booking market by the end of FY21 by ixigo’s own account; the group put its OTA train share at 62% in the quarter ended March 2026 and 63% in the quarter ended June 2026. Two founders who had spent seven years unable to raise a Series A ended up as key managerial personnel of a listed company, each holding 2.12% of it at the time of the February 2024 DRHP.
The money behind it
ConfirmTkt’s funding history is short enough to list in full, and the acquisition accounting is where the real money shows up.
- 2015 angel round: undisclosed amount led by Pravin Agarwala, ex-VP at SAP Labs India (Inc42, July 2015). This paid for the iOS app and the first hires beyond the founders.
- January 2016 round: $250,000 from Venture Catalysts with angels including Anirudh Damani and Urrshila Kerkar (Voice&Data, September 2016). Venture Catalysts brought the network that eventually put the company in front of acquirers; it exited fully in the 2021 sale.
- Total raised as an independent company: about $330,000 (Entrackr, September 2018). No Series A was ever closed.
- February 2021, ixigo buys 50.1%: roughly ₹17.9 crore cash plus ₹6 crore non-compete; total consideration for the business booked at ₹94.76 crore (ixigo FY24 annual report, Note 46).
- June 2021, share swap: ixigo allotted 29,934 equity shares at ₹9,970 each to Kotha and Vaidya on 15 June 2021 in exchange for 41,871 ConfirmTkt shares valued at ₹7,127.80 apiece; ixigo recorded ₹37.30 crore of shares issued on a fair-value basis, taking its stake to 83.68% by 31 March 2022 (ixigo FY22 and FY24 annual reports).
- FY23: a further ₹24.05 crore paid in cash, taking the stake to 90.08% (ixigo FY24 annual report).
- FY24: the remaining 9.92% bought for ₹32.86 crore; the company recorded a ₹62.67 crore increase in the fair value of contingent consideration that year, a sign the earn-out was worth more because ConfirmTkt outperformed. Preference shares issued under the merger scheme were then bought back for ₹39.80 crore including tax.
- All in: ixigo’s own reconciliation shows net cash outflow on the ConfirmTkt acquisition of ₹113.95 crore, on top of the ₹37.30 crore of shares issued to the founders (ixigo FY24 annual report, Note 46).
- Latest valuation: there is no standalone valuation after 2021. The parent, ixigo, was worth ₹6,916 crore (about $720 million) on 25 September 2026 (Screener), against an IPO price of ₹93 in June 2024.
How it makes money
The part people get wrong is the prediction. ConfirmTkt has never charged for the confirmation forecast that made it famous; the forecast is the acquisition funnel. Money comes from the ticket that the forecast leads to, and from what gets attached to it.
- Agent service charges on train tickets: ixigo acts as a B2C ticketing principal for IRCTC under a non-exclusive agreement first awarded in May 2017 and currently valid until 30 April 2028 (JM Financial, January 2025, citing the DRHP). The customer pays the rail fare, which passes through to IRCTC, plus a service charge that ixigo keeps. IRCTC also receives a revenue share, which JM Financial lists among the train segment’s direct costs.
- Payment-gateway charges, value-added services and advertising: ixigo’s Q4 FY25 investor presentation names these as the other three train revenue streams. Value-added services include assured-refund products that pay up to three times the fare if a waitlisted ticket does not confirm, and a free-cancellation option.
- The take rate: train gross take rate, meaning gross ticketing revenue divided by GTV, was 6.46% in FY24, 6.04% in FY25 and 6.09% in FY26 (ixigo Q4 FY26 investor presentation). On FY26 figures, that works out to roughly ₹795 of GTV and ₹49 of revenue per passenger segment.
- Where the margin sits: train contribution margin was ₹155.5 crore on ₹511.3 crore of revenue in FY26, a 30.4% margin, down from 34.9% in FY24 as marketing and refund guarantees grew (same source). Costs below that line are payment-gateway fees, IRCTC’s share, customer refunds and support.
- Cross-sell: the train app is the cheapest customer-acquisition channel ixigo has. As of the first nine months of FY24, 31.3% of ixigo’s flight passenger segments were booked through its train- and bus-focused apps, and in the June 2026 quarter management said 90% of hotel bookings came from the existing user base.
The numbers
ConfirmTkt filed its own accounts until FY23. From FY24 it was merged into ixigo, so the honest way to follow it is standalone to FY23 and then ixigo’s train segment, which combines the ConfirmTkt and ixigo Trains apps.
| Confirm Ticket Online Solutions (standalone) | Revenue (₹ crore) | Profit after tax (₹ crore) | Source |
| FY20 | 21.4 | 1.54 | Filings cited by Inc42, February 2021 |
| FY21 | 37.2 | Not disclosed | ixigo annual report FY22 |
| FY22 | 128.2 (turnover 128.6) | 14.25 (PBT 19.33) | ixigo annual report FY22, Form AOC-1 |
| FY23 | 171.3 | 19.69 (PBT 26.39) | ixigo annual report FY24, restated merger figures |
- FY21 to FY22 revenue growth: 244.3%, company-stated. FY22 to FY23: 33.6%, our arithmetic on the two filings.
- Net margin: 11.1% in FY22 and 11.5% in FY23. Employee cost in FY23 was ₹9.5 crore on ₹171.3 crore of revenue; the largest line was other expenses at ₹133.1 crore, mostly payment, marketing and refund costs.
- The FY23 column includes consolidation adjustments such as ₹3.3 crore of amortisation on acquired intangibles, so the underlying operating profit was slightly higher than shown.
| ixigo train segment (ixigo Trains + ConfirmTkt) | Passenger segments (million) | GTV (₹ crore) | Revenue (₹ crore) | Contribution margin (₹ crore, %) |
| FY23 | 68.97 | 4,471.5 | 297.8 | 96.1 (32.3%) |
| FY24 | 77.38 | 5,568.5 | 370.4 | 129.4 (34.9%) |
| FY25 | 96.03 | 7,410.5 | 456.9 | 152.7 (33.4%) |
| FY26 | 104.12 | 8,279.0 | 511.3 | 155.5 (30.4%) |
| Q1 FY27 | 24.4 (down 8% YoY) | 2,138.9 | 141.0 (up 9% YoY) | 52.7 (37%) |
Source: ixigo Q4 FY25 and Q4 FY26 investor presentations and Q1 FY27 media release. For context, ixigo’s consolidated revenue rose from ₹501.3 crore in FY23 to ₹655.9 crore in FY24, ₹914.2 crore in FY25 and ₹1,228 crore in FY26, with profit after tax of ₹23.4 crore, ₹73.1 crore, ₹60.3 crore and ₹71.5 crore respectively.
Where the money comes from
- By product, inside the train segment: agent service charges dominate, followed by payment-gateway charges, value-added services and advertising (ixigo Q4 FY25 investor presentation). ixigo does not publish the split between them.
- By brand: ixigo stopped reporting ConfirmTkt separately after the FY23 merger. The last standalone year shows ConfirmTkt at ₹171.3 crore of a ₹297.8 crore train segment, or about 57%. ConfirmTkt’s historic base is South India, per JM Financial; the ixigo Trains app is stronger in the north.
- By geography and user type: the group reported over 57 crore annual active users in FY26, 82.98 million average monthly active users and 141.5 million passenger segments booked, with 810.9 million lifetime downloads and 85.55% of FY26 transactions coming from repeat users (Q4 FY26 investor presentation). Management describes the customer as the “next billion user” from Tier II, III and IV towns.
- The market behind it: IRCTC’s chairman said in September 2026 that 89% of railway tickets are now booked online, of which 53% come through IRCTC’s own Rail Connect app, 17% through its website and 28% through business associates such as ixigo, ConfirmTkt, MakeMyTrip and Paytm, on a base of roughly 15 lakh online tickets a day (Free Press Journal). JM Financial’s read of IRCTC annual reports put the OTA share of e-tickets at 20.0% in FY23 and 18.6% in FY24, the dip caused by railways reopening offline reservation for second-seating.
- The surprise: the business ixigo bought ConfirmTkt to dominate is no longer its biggest profit pool. Trains were 59.4% of ixigo’s revenue in FY23 and 41.6% in FY26. In FY26 flights produced ₹160.3 crore of contribution margin against trains’ ₹155.5 crore, and in the June 2026 quarter buses produced ₹54.2 crore against trains’ ₹52.7 crore. Trains are still the funnel; they are no longer the destination.
The risks
- One counterparty controls the inventory. Every reserved train ticket ConfirmTkt sells is an IRCTC ticket sold under a non-exclusive agreement that runs to 30 April 2028 and can be terminated for breach. IRCTC is free to sign more distribution partners, and its own Rail Connect app already carries 53% of online bookings. ixigo’s DRHP flagged that any variation or termination of the agreement would adversely affect the business, and JM Financial repeats the point as the first company-specific risk in its coverage.
- Policy can shrink the pie without warning. On the May 2026 earnings call Aloke Bajpai listed the changes that hit the quarter: tighter Tatkal booking windows for OTAs and agents, reduced waitlist inventory across the system, re-verification of repeat users and Aadhaar verification norms. The mechanism is direct: fewer waitlisted tickets means fewer people who need a prediction, and Tatkal restrictions remove the most fee-tolerant bookings. Train passenger segments fell 8% year on year in the June 2026 quarter even as market share rose to 63%, and management declined to guide on train growth until the upgraded PRS system arrives.
- Margins are drifting the wrong way. Train contribution margin has slipped from 34.9% in FY24 to 30.4% in FY26, and gross take rate from 6.46% to 6.09%, as ixigo spends on brand (Rana Daggubati as ConfirmTkt’s face, RCB and Rohit Sharma partnerships) and underwrites refund guarantees on unconfirmed tickets. Management’s stated answer is to reinvest train profits into hotels and AI rather than defend train margin, which is a choice shareholders may or may not share.
- The brand outlived its company. The legal entity was dissolved into ixigo from 1 April 2023, the founders’ non-compete was booked with a three-year life from 2021, and the acquisition earn-out has been fully paid. What keeps ConfirmTkt distinct now is a marketing decision and two executives’ continued presence, not a corporate structure.
The takeaway
ConfirmTkt is a case for solving the moment of pain rather than the whole journey. The founders did not build a travel super-app; they built the one screen a waitlisted passenger opens at 11 pm, made it right nine times out of ten, and let the transaction follow the trust. Because the utility was free and sticky, customer acquisition cost stayed close to zero, which is why a company that raised $330,000 could post an 11% net margin while venture-funded rivals burned cash for the same users. The lesson transfers: a narrow tool that is genuinely relied upon is worth more to an acquirer than a broad platform that is merely used, and it is worth more still if you have the discipline to stay profitable while you wait for the right buyer. The cost of that discipline was seven years without a Series A and an exit at 2.5 times trailing revenue. Whether that was a bargain for ixigo or a fair price for founders who had run out of road is a question the ₹113.95 crore of eventual cash outflow, and two 2.12% stakes in a listed company, answer in different ways.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns ConfirmTkt now?
ixigo (Le Travenues Technology Limited) owns it outright. ixigo bought 50.1% in February 2021, reached 83.68% by March 2022, 90.08% by March 2023 and 100% in FY24, and merged the legal entity into itself with effect from 1 April 2023 under an NCLT Chandigarh order passed in January 2024. The app continues as a separate brand.
How much did ixigo pay for ConfirmTkt?
The deal was announced as undisclosed, but ixigo’s FY24 annual report records total purchase consideration of ₹94.76 crore, of which ₹81.70 crore was goodwill. Including later payments for the remaining stake and the buyback of merger preference shares, net cash outflow was ₹113.95 crore, plus ₹37.30 crore of ixigo shares issued to the founders in June 2021.
Was ConfirmTkt profitable before the acquisition?
Yes. Filings cited by Inc42 show ₹21.4 crore of revenue and ₹1.54 crore of profit in FY20. After the deal it reported ₹14.25 crore of profit after tax on ₹128.2 crore of revenue in FY22 and ₹19.69 crore on ₹171.3 crore in FY23, according to ixigo’s annual reports.
How accurate is ConfirmTkt’s waitlist prediction?
The company reported 88% accuracy in July 2015 and over 90% from 2016 onwards, per Inc42 and Voice&Data. The forecast is free; the company earns from the ticket booking, payment charges, value-added services such as assured refunds, and advertising.
What share of India’s online train bookings does ConfirmTkt have?
ixigo does not split the brand out, but the group put its combined OTA train market share at 63% in the quarter ended June 2026, up from more than 42% at the end of FY21. OTAs as a whole account for 28% of IRCTC’s online bookings, according to IRCTC’s chairman in September 2026, with IRCTC’s own app and website taking 70%.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Le Travenues Technology Limited, Annual Report FY2023-24, Note 46 Business combinations and directors’ report on the amalgamation of Confirm Ticket Online Solutions Private Limited, September 2024
- Le Travenues Technology Limited, Annual Report FY2021-22, chairman’s letter and Form AOC-1 subsidiary statement, September 2022
- ixigo, Q4 FY26 earnings investor presentation and media release, May 2026
- ixigo, Q4 FY26 earnings call transcript, 21 May 2026
- ixigo, Q1 FY27 media release, 6 August 2026
- ixigo, Q4 FY25 earnings investor presentation and media release, May 2025
- JM Financial Institutional Securities, Le Travenues Technology initiating coverage, 13 January 2025
- Inc42, “ixigo DRHP: a look at the online travel aggregator’s top guns and shareholding pattern”, February 2024
- Inc42, “Decoding the ixigo moat ahead of INR 120 Cr public listing”, May 2024
- Inc42, “ixigo acquires Confirmtkt to fulfil post-Covid train travel demand”, February 2021
- Entrepreneur India, “ixigo acquires online train ticket booking platform Confirmtkt”, February 2021
- Entrackr, “How ConfirmTkt sheds utility DNA to become transactional platform”, September 2018
- Entrackr, “ixigo posts Rs 501 Cr revenue and Rs 23 Cr profit in FY23”, November 2023
- Entrackr, “ixigo posts Rs 357 Cr revenue in Q1 FY27; profit rises 81%”, August 2026
- Voice&Data, “Travelling on waitlisted tickets becomes history with ConfirmTkt app”, September 2016
- Inc42, “With 180k+ app downloads, train ticket discovery and prediction platform ConfirmTkt receives angel funding”, July 2015
- Dinesh Kumar Kotha, “6 years of ConfirmTkt, Chapter 1 (Launch)”, Medium, July 2020
- CrazyEngineers Founders Circuit, interview with Sripad Vaidya, republished October 2024
- Free Press Journal, “IRCTC reveals 28% of online railway ticket bookings come through Paytm, MakeMyTrip, ixigo and other third-party platforms”, September 2026
- PRS Legislative Research, “Impact of COVID-19 on Railway’s finances”, April 2020
- Screener.in, Le Travenues Technology consolidated financials and market capitalisation, accessed 25 September 2026
- Trading Economics, USD/INR reference rate, 18 September 2026
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