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EbixCash Acquires AHA Taxis, a Platform for On-Demand Inter-City Cabs in India
[December 06, 2018]

EbixCash Acquires AHA Taxis, a Platform for On-Demand Inter-City Cabs in India


JOHNS CREEK, Ga., Dec. 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ebix, Inc. (NASDAQ: EBIX), a leading international supplier of On-Demand software and E-commerce services to the insurance, financial, healthcare and e-learning industries, today announced that one of its India-based EbixCash subsidiaries has acquired a 70 percent stake in AHA Taxis, a platform for on-demand inter-city cabs in India. AHA focuses its attention on Corporate and Consumer inter-city travel primarily, with a network of more than 15,000 registered AHA Taxis.

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AHA has pioneered an offering of one-way fare for hiring taxis for outstation trips, whereas the trade norm used to be to charge the return fare. AHA solved this problem while engaging its proprietary technology, algorithm and network.

Founded by first generation entrepreneurs Amit Grover, Kunal Krishna and Shivam Mishra, who bring a solid blend of experience and youth to EbixCash, with hands on execution expertise in technology, operations and marketing; the Company today has a network spread across 4,000+ cities, having served 20,000+ routes and 15+ million kilometers of travel as of now.

Build on cutting edge technology that is served over the cloud to all its constituents, the AHA Taxis service is available at finger tips to consumers and corporates across the country. With features like number masking, live tracking, open APIs, multiple payment gateways, the AHA Taxis solution is available over any mobile device in an App form or over the internet in a matter of minutes wherever you are in India.

The AHA Taxis service is considered one of the most efficient and cost effective one-way inter-city travel options in India today, as the Company at any time has a massive registered network of cars who have just finished a one-way travel to a city from their home base location and are looking for passengers, to return back to their home city wanting to avoid going back without a passenger; and are thus willing to price the trip aggressively.

With partners like PayTM, Makemytrip, Yatra, Via, RailYatri, Zomato, Mobikwik, Savaari and Ticketgoose.com, AHA Taxis has built an impressive customer retention rate of approximately 30% and one of the lowest customer acquisition costs in the industry at 5% of its revenues. The AHA Taxis App is available on Android Google play and Apple devices both, besides being accessible on the web at www.ahataxis.com

With an inter-city market opportunity that is presently estimated at $10 Billion, and growing at 20% annually, AHA Taxis has focused its attention on this focused inter-city market segment. With a population of 1.3 billion people, an estimated 90% of the cab trips are booked one-way with two-way trips accounting for only 10% of the cab trips. AHA has focused its attention on this section through a blend of partnerships with OTAs, online and offline travel agents, Corporates, and the B2C Direct channel.

Ebix Chairman, President and CEO Robin Raina said “AHA Taxis provides our Via and Mercury travel brands with another in-house tool to cross-sll cab services to our Corporates, B2C clients and OTA clients. We were already using AHA as one of the outside vendors to whom we would handover inter-city cab travel, because of the efficiency and pricing provided by AHA.  Our 260,000+ strong franchise network will now be able to not only sell cab travel as an integral tool through online cloud based technology, but also be able to register new car drivers to the AHA network across the country and convert AHA into one of the largest inter-city cab networks in the country.”



AHA Co-Founder Amit Grover said, 'We have been a startup till now that has grown approximately 100 times since January 2015. We grew AHA on minimal seed capital and became break-even in 2018. We needed the physical and digital client & franchisee expanse of a massive network like EbixCash to substantially grow our business. We are quite excited by the growth opportunities ahead of us.”

AHA Co-Founder Kunal Krishna said, “Our domain knowledge and technology has helped us solve the several decades problem plaguing the taxi travel space in the country. With Ebix, we intend to take AHA offerings to every Tier 2, Tier 3 city in the country and help millions of people save money on their travel. AHA technology does not only solve the problem for India, and in-fact can also be extended to other South Asian countries.”


AHA Co-Founder Shivam Mishra said, AHA has been positively changing the dynamics of outstation taxi market in India. We are set out with a mission of ‘Anywhere to anywhere one-way out-station taxi’, and we are ecstatic that Ebix would be helping us achieve our mission, and change the way people travel in the country.”

Prosight Partners advised AHA Taxis on this transaction. Ebix did not use any Investment Bankers.

About Ebix and EbixCash

With 50+ offices across 5 continents, Ebix, Inc., (NASDAQ: EBIX) endeavors to provide On-Demand software and E-commerce services to the insurance, financial, healthcare and e-learning industries. In the Insurance sector, the Company’s main focus is to develop and deploy a wide variety of insurance and reinsurance exchanges on an on-demand basis, while also, providing Software-as-a-Service ("SaaS") enterprise solutions in the area of CRM, front-end & back-end systems, outsourced administrative and risk compliance, across the world.

With a "Phygital” strategy that combines 260,000 physical distribution outlets in many Southeast Asian Nations (“ASEAN”) countries, to an Omni-channel online digital platform, the Company’s EbixCash Financial exchange portfolio encompasses leadership in areas of domestic & international money remittance, Forex, travel, pre-paid & gift cards, utility payments, lending etc., in an emerging country like India. The Company’s Forex Exchange has an approximate 70% market share of India’s airport Foreign Exchange business encompassing 25 international airports like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata International airports, while conducting over 1 million transactions per annum. EbixCash, through its travel portal Via.com, is also one of Southeast Asia’s leading travel exchanges with over 110,000 distribution outlets and 8,000 corporate clients processing over 24.5 million transactions every year. For further details, visit www.ebixcash.com

Through its various SaaS-based software platforms, Ebix employs thousands of domain-specific technology professionals to provide products, support and consultancy to thousands of customers on six continents. For more information, visit the Company’s website at www.ebix.com 

SAFE HARBOR REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
As used herein, the terms “Ebix,” “the Company,” “we,” “our” and “us” refer to Ebix, Inc., a Delaware corporation, and its consolidated subsidiaries as a combined entity, except where it is clear that the terms mean only Ebix, Inc.

The information contained in this Press Release contains forward-looking statements and information within the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. This information includes assumptions made by, and information currently available to management, including statements regarding future economic performance and financial condition, liquidity and capital resources, acceptance of the Company's products by the market, and management's plans and objectives. In addition, certain statements included in this and our future filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), in press releases, and in oral and written statements made by us or with our approval, which are not statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. Words such as "may," "could," "should," "would," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "intend," "seeks," "plan," "project," "continue," "predict," "will," "should," and other words or expressions of similar meaning are intended by the Company to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. These forward-looking statements are found at various places throughout this report and in the documents incorporated herein by reference. These statements are based on our current expectations about future events or results and information that is currently available to us, involve assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, and speak only as of the date on which such statements are made.

Our actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements. Factors that may cause such a difference, include, but are not limited to those discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent reports filed with the SEC, as well as: the risk of an unfavorable outcome of the pending governmental investigations or shareholder class action lawsuits, reputational harm caused by such investigations and lawsuits, the willingness of independent insurance agencies to outsource their computer and other processing needs to third parties; pricing and other competitive pressures and the Company's ability to gain or maintain share of sales as a result of actions by competitors and others; changes in estimates in critical accounting judgments; changes in or failure to comply with laws and regulations, including accounting standards, taxation requirements (including tax rate changes, new tax laws and revised tax interpretations) in domestic or foreign jurisdictions; exchange rate fluctuations and other risks associated with investments and operations in foreign countries (particularly in Australia, UK and India wherein we have significant operations); equity markets, including market disruptions and significant interest rate fluctuations, which may impede our access to, or increase the cost of, external financing; and international conflict, including terrorist acts.

Except as expressly required by the federal securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update any such factors, or to publicly announce the results of, or changes to any of the forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect future events, developments, changed circumstances, or for any other reason.

Readers should carefully review the disclosures and the risk factors described in the documents we file from time to time with the SEC, including future reports on Forms 10-Q and 8-K, and any amendments thereto. You may obtain our SEC filings at our website, www.ebix.com under the "Investor Information" section, or over the Internet at the SEC's web site, www.sec.gov.

CONTACT:
Gautam Sharma or Darren Joseph
+1-678 -281-2027 or [email protected]

Chris Eddy or David Collins
Catalyst IR +1- 212-924-9800 or [email protected]

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