Ashish Kashyap

FOUNDER OF IBIBO

Mr. Ashish Kashyap invaded the e-commerce strata with ideas like as Goibibo.com (travel), Tradus.com (online shopping), PayU India (Payment gateway) and the number one casual gaming platform - ibibo games. Prior to launching ibibo group in India, Ashish was the Country Head of Google India, wherein he set up the domestic business operations from ground up. Before joining Google, Ashish "founded" E-Commerce businesses at Indiatimes.com and drove them to a profitable and scalable position. At Times Group, he architected first of its kind "Reverse Auctions" platform called "Tell Your Price"; created India's first "Travel Auction" platform and also launched 'fixed price market places'. Ashish holds an Economics Honors degree from University Of Delhi, India and an International Masters in Practicing Management (IMPM) from Insead, Fontainebleau, France.

Mr. Ashish launched ibibo's payments unit - PayU to drive enhanced conversions for Goibibo and then later provided the platform to thousands of third party merchants, which was hived off to Naspers global payments unit in January 2014.

Tradus is already one of the top ranked shopping apps on Android, Windows and iOs. But Mr Ashish says, "Tradus is still a small experiment amongst various projects. This is the usual culture of our company. Always run small and many experiments." Ashish has driven the acquisition of redBus.in, a significant milestone in the evolution of Indian internet industry.

Ibibo started as a social network in 2007, then pivoted into games, and again into e-commerce and transactions. On asking Ashish about the fields he is going to introduce further, he says, "In the first year or so we experimented with lots of products and services. It was a green field operation."

Experimentation, trial and error is the key tenant of building internet businesses. Goibibo.com too was an experiment which grew very fast. Post that Ashish and his team has expanded into various online travel services by both building and acquiring (example redBus). "Since 2009, we have only focussed in the truncations and online travel space. And we will continue to do so. We have scaled online travel assets like Goibibo, redBus, YourBus and TBOGroup. This makes us a clear leader in this space. Going forward we will continue to expand in this category itself," mentions Ashish.

ibibo Group is an online travel organization founded in January 2007 by Ashish Kashyap. The company is a subsidiary of Naspers,which owns an 80% stake in Ibibo Group. In February, Naspers announced plans to increase its stake in Ibibo Group to 90% by investing additional $250 million in the company.

The group owns the B2C online travel aggregator Goibibo, and online bus ticketing platform Redbus.in, and has a 51% stake in the B2Btravel website travelboutiqueonline.com. The company also owns a minority stake in Naspers' payment gateway business PayU Global.

In 2013, ibibo Group was named one of the top five most trusted e-commerce brands in India in The Brand Trust Report India Study – 2013.

Acquisition and Investments

• Goibibo.com
• PayU India
• redbus.in
• YourBus
• Djubo