IndiaMart sells travel marketplace HelloTravel ahead of proposed IPO

IndiaMart InterMesh Ltd, which operates business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce firm IndiaMart, has announced the sale of its online travel marketplace HelloTravel ahead of its proposed initial public offering (IPO).

IndiaMart will sell HelloTravel to its promoter firm, Hellotravel Online Pvt. Ltd (HOPL), on a slump sale basis for Rs 68 lakh, the company said in its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) filed with the capital markets regulator.

HelloTravel is a marketplace that connects users with travel packages and holiday deals posted by travel agents. The platform has a network of over 7,000 travel agents. 

The Delhi-based firm, founded by Dinesh Chandra Agarwal, filed its draft prospectus with ​the ​Securities and Exchange Board of India on 29 June for an IPO that will see three venture capital investors make partial exits.

The public issue size is estimated at Rs 600 crore ($88 million), according to people in the know. The IPO, which will see a 15% stake dilution, may value the firm at around Rs 4,000 crore, VCCircle estimates show. 

The firms making partial exits are Intel Corp.’s venture capital arm Intel Capital (Mauritius) Ltd, Accion Frontier Inclusion Mauritius and Amadeus IV DPF Ltd.

HelloTravel operates in an online travel segment dominated by MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Yatra, and TravelTriangle, among others. 

In late-2016, in the biggest-ever consolidation move in the online travel space in India, Nasdaq-listed MakeMyTrip agreed to buy Ibibo Group, co-owned by South African technology group Naspers Ltd and Chinese investment firm Tencent, in a stock deal.

That same year, Yatra had entered into a reverse merger agreement with a US-based special purpose acquisition company, paving the way for a backdoor listing for a second Indian online travel agent in the US after its peer MakeMyTrip.

Holiday-packages marketplace TravelTriangle recently raised $12 million (Rs 78 crore) from growth-capital firm The Fundamentum Partnership. Fundamentum was floated by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and Helion Ventures co-founder Sanjeev Aggarwal.

Earlier this year, homegrown e-commerce major Flipkart marked its entry into the online travel agency (OTA) space by partnering with MakeMyTrip to provide its users with travel options.

IndiaMart

IndiaMart runs an online B2B platform for small and medium businesses that connect global buyers with suppliers. The company was founded in 1996.

IndiaMart was styled on the lines of China’s Alibaba Group. However, while Alibaba ventured into B2B and B2C e-commerce segments and grew to become the world’s largest online seller, IndiaMART confined itself to matching buyers and sellers.

The company claims its platform enables 24 million buyers to search from over 30 million products and connect with 2.1 million suppliers.

IndiaMart raised about Rs 100 crore in March 2016 in a Series C funding round by selling shares to Amadeus Capital, WestBridge Capital, Accion and Intel Capital. This was the first investment in an Indian company by UK-based technology venture capital firm Amadeus.