Wings Travels acquires cab booking service Bookmycab

Pune-based Wings Travels wingstravels.in Management Pvt Ltd, which provides staff transportation services, has acquired taxi services company Bookmycab for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition will help Wings Travels expand into the radio taxi segment and strengthen its technological capabilities, founder Arun Kharat told Techcircle.in.

The merged entity will be rebranded as WingsTravels Bookmycab. It will be run by Mumbai-based LiveMinds Technologies Pvt Ltd, which owns Bookmycab, Kharat said.

Kharat said a mobile app with the new name will be rolled out that will offer a host of services including inter-city transport under a single platform.

Wings Travels, which has been operating since 2001, primarily offered staff transport services to business process outsourcing firms. It has about 600 employees and offers its services in Mumbai, Pune, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Nagpur, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad, among other cities.

The acquisition will help Wings Travels to expand its services to 47 cities in India and offer its radio taxi services in Yangon (Myanmar), Chiang Mai (Thailand) and Vietnam. While its Yangon operations commenced about three months ago, the Thailand operations are likely to start from the first week of May.

"We will expand to all the Indian cities that have airports and up our Southeast Asian play by the end of 2016," said Kharat.

As part of the transaction, Avinash Gupta, the founder of Bookmycab, will join the merged entity. However, it is not clear whether he will continue or exit at a later stage. Kharat refused to divulge any details on this.

In July last year, reports of auto-rickshaw aggregator Jugnoo being in talks to acquire Bookmycab had made the rounds. But the deal didn't go through. The Economic Times, which first reported the Wings-Bookmycab deal, said talks with Jugnoo fell through as the acquisition was linked to their Series B fund raiser that got delayed.

Queries sent by Techcircle.in to Bookmycab, which is backed by YourNest Angel Fund and Mumbai Angels, didn't elicit any response at the time of filing this report.