Goomo acquires B2B car rental marketplace WagonBee

Singapore and Mumbai-based Goomo Holdings Services India Private Limited, which operates online travel and holiday booking platform Goomo, has acquired WagonBee, a business-to-business vehicle rental marketplace, a company statement said.

With this acquisition, Goomo will add road transportation services to its product portfolio, Varun Gupta, chief executive of the firm, said in the statement.

WagonBee Technologies Pvt. Ltd was established by former NIT Trichy graduates Vikash Singh and Navneet Misra in 2016.

The Noida-based company helps travel agents and suppliers rent vehicles, ranging from hatchbacks and sedans to luxury coaches and buses, provided by over 350 verified vendors.

The company claims to be present in over 40 cities across India with nearly 8,000 itineraries and connections.

“WagonBee and Goomo are a perfect synergistic match given the similarities in our understanding of this fragmented market. We share a common vision of how this space can be organised better via apt solutions for our partner vendors as well as customised offerings to meet the evolving customer needs,” said Misra, co-founder of WagonBee, in the statement.

Goomo is an omni-channel travel-tech company that offers its services across three business segments of travel: consumer, corporate and B2B. This includes booking flights, holiday packages (both domestic and international), listing and travel packages for trade fairs across industries.

The company was established in 2015 with the acquisition of Orbit Corporate and Leisure Tours Pvt. Ltd, a 27-year-old operator in trade fairs and MICE conferences. In June 2017, Mauritius-based private equity firm Emerging India invested $50 million (RS 321.6 crore) in Goomo. The PE firm had acquired a majority stake in Orbit in November 2015. A report in The Hindu Business Line in February 2017 stated that Emerging India had put in about $180 million to acquire Orbit Corporate and Leisure Travels.

Besides WagonBee, Goomo has also acquired Zopky, a holiday marketplace startup, in 2016. The move was aimed at building its presence in the holiday packages space.