MakeMyTrip Acquires Travel Planning Startup Mygola

MakeMyTrip has made another move to expand its travel services, with the acquisition of a travel startup named Mygola for an undisclosed amount.

The online travel company (specifically MakeMyTrip Limited) in a press statement announced that it had acquired "certain assets" of Mygola.com, and added the entire Mygola team is now joining MakeMyTrip.

(Also see: MakeMyTrip Shows Other Brands How to Win Twitter)

The firm says the acquisition was done through its earlier announced Innovation Fund, which was formed to invest in startups or early-stage companies in the travel technology space.

The startup Mygola is best known as a travel planner that could help people get around in cities. It covered various cities including Bangalore, Bangkok, Chicago, Delhi, Dubai, Goa, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Kuala Lumpur, Las Vegas, Mumbai, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, and Toronto among others. Mygola was founded in 2009 by Anshuman Bapna and Prateek Sharma; it raised capital from investors including Helion Ventures, Blumberg Capital, 500Startups and "numerous angels".

The press statement notes, "The company [Mygola] built proprietary technology to mine the travel web, filed patents on route optimization, and collected deep metadata for millions of travel items and thousands of high-quality itineraries. It also pioneered a unique crowdsourced model for curating travel data at massive scale."

Commenting on the acquisition, Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder and CEO, MakeMyTrip India said, "Mygola team's deep understanding of travellers' planning and in-destination experience preferences will be very valuable in strengthening our proposition in these and related areas of customer engagement. We were very impressed with their ability to build world-class experiences on both web and mobile for the global audience".

Anshuman Bapna, CEO of Mygola said, "We've always taken pride in being laser-focused on the traveller's needs and rethinking online travel planning. MakeMyTrip is the leader in one of the world's most exciting travel markets, and the team is super-excited to bring all this knowledge to the millions of MakeMyTrip travellers".