One97 Comunications owned India’s largest digital payments startup Paytm has recently acquired majority stakes in a Mumbai based online ticketing and events platform Insider.in as per the report.
Founded by Shreyas Srinivasan in August 2014, Insider.in will continue running the business by enabling Paytm’s more than 200 million registered customers to discover a wide range of events and book them instantly.
The terms of the acquisition are not disclosed for now.
“Events discovery and ticket booking is a challenge for customers and organisers alike. We believe that digital discovery and events marketing expertise will increase supply of quality events in India. This is a natural extension for us,” Madhur Deora, chief financial officer, Paytm, said in a statement.
Srinivasan said the number of events and experiences added to the platform last year increased five-times to about 4,000 events by the end of December.
“We saw 1.1 million monthly active users between October last year and March this year, which is the event season in India. We can also note that 30-40% of our users are repeat customers.The Paytm acquisition gives us both credibility and massive reach,” said Srinivasan.
Insider.in was operated by OML (Only Much Louder) Entertainment Pvt. Ltd, which runs the annual, multi-city music festival Bacardi NH7 Weekender and TV series The Dewarists.
Paytm joined the online ticketing business after the market leader BookMyShow and readily expanded its movie ticketing business, with a coverage of 3,500 screens across 550 cities. The company claims it sold 20-25 million movie tickets in 2016, about a fourth of what BookMyShow did in the same period. While Paytm’s focus has largely been on movie tickets, the deal with Insider.com will help it get into the lucrative events segment as well.