In March 2020 Rajnish Kumar sat on his bed and his watch buzzed. Heart rate, 120. He was not exercising.
Bookings had gone to zero. Revenue had gone to zero. ixigo, a travel company he and Aloke Bajpai had been building since 2007, had nothing to sell while the country's trains and planes stood still. Open magazine reported that around then a buyer made an offer to take the company, an offer the founders found humiliating after fourteen years of work, with a demand to decide quickly. They said no.
They were IIT Kanpur alumni who had worked in Europe, and had left that path to start a flight metasearch in India.
They were IIT Kanpur alumni who had worked in Europe, and had left that path to start a flight metasearch in India. What almost nobody knew was how thin their personal finances had become. After years of living without conventional salaries, Open reports, banks did not treat their founder income as income, and one of them had to put down a deposit just to get an ordinary credit card.
That detail explains the rest. When ixigo bought the train platform ConfirmTkt in 2021, they signed personal guarantees to secure venture debt, which the magazine described as debt that knew their home addresses. In Covid, senior leaders took pay cuts of roughly 70 to 80 per cent, later converted into stock options. Both founders had young children and warned each other that time with them does not come back. Bajpai later went on a ten-day retreat in Gaya because his sleep was shallow, and his wife told him to go again.
The turn came from a boring place. Indians kept checking train status. ixigo had built a rail product, and ConfirmTkt and AbhiBus added trains and buses to it. By the time travel reopened, the company was ready.
In June 2024 ixigo listed on the NSE and BSE, and its shares debuted about 48.5% above the issue price. For FY24 it reported revenue of Rs 655 crore and a net profit of Rs 73 crore. Open says an employee had once asked Bajpai when they would do an IPO, and an uncle who had doubted the company's finances admitted he had been wrong.
The credit card is the moral, though neither founder frames it that way. For years they bet their own paychecks on the company. A founder's belief is cheap until the bank refuses to see it as income.