Yatra Acquires Common Investor-backed Buzzintown

Buzzintown is owned by five year old Bangalore-based start-up Wortal Technologies Pvt.Ltd and led by its co-founder & CEO Amitabh Saran. It is backed by venture capital firm Intel Capital (that invested through two rounds in 2008 and 2009). Intel Capital is also one of the investors in Yatra.com.

According to VCCedge, the financial research platform of VCCircle, Wortal Technologies doubled its revenues for FY10 clocking income of Rs 5.7 crore as against Rs 2.8 crore in FY09.

The firm also managed to improve its bottom line by cutting its net loss by around half to Rs 1.8 crore during FY10.

Started as a ticketing site, Buzzintown.com had earlier tied up with VAS provider Handygo Technologies Pvt. Ltd to offer Zing, a SMS deals service. The company offers information on deals and events in major cities of India that include Mumbai, Delhi (NCR), Chennai and Bangalore, among others.

It competes with the likes of Bookmyshow.

In terms of synergies, one aspect that we can see in this deal is more travel deals on Buzzintown. The site already has a section related to travel that can really be pumped up with Yatra's inventory. Secondly, Yatra also launched a deal section sometime back and hence both the sites can draw on each other's strengths to power the respective deal sections in either site.

Last year, Yatra had raised Rs 200 crore in funding from San Francisco-based Valiant Capital Management, Norwest Venture Partners and Intel Capital.

The company had at that time disclosed that it would use the funding to rev up its hotels and holiday booking business through an acquisition- the acquisition of Buzzintown could be a result of that. There won't be a further round of fundraising by Yatra since the company plans to go public next year.