Is $100 Mn Series D round enough for BookMyShow to fight Paytm?

Online movie and ticketing platform BookMyShow has raised $100 million from middle market and growth equity investment fund TPG Growth. Existing investors Stripes Group, SAIF Partners, and Accel Partners also participated in Series D round.

The fresh round for the Mumbai-based company has come after two years. It raised $81.5 million round led by Stripes Group. The company will use proceed towards fueling growth.

Following this round, competition between BookMyShow and Alibaba-backed Paytm is slated to escalate. The Noida-based Unicorn has been giving cash backs and recently introduced production house-centric loyalty programme.

Of late, Paytm has been narrowing gap with BookMyShow, that had not seen any serious competition till 2016. Paytm began movie and event ticketing in June 2016 and since then it has come a long way. The company had claimed to sell 52 million movie and event tickets in the calendar year 2017.

On the lines of US-based MoviePaas, Paytm had also launched loyalty programme Moviepass. It offers unlimited movie tickets for just $9.95 a month.

To beef up its position in entertainment ticketing vertical, Paytm had acquired Chennai-based online ticketing platform TicketNew. Besides, a year ago, it had acquired a majority stake in online ticketing platform, Insider.in.

Meanwhile, the movie ticketing market in India is estimated to be worth nearly $2 billion and has been growing at 10 per cent annually. As of now, the only 15 per cent of the overall domestic market is online. Thus, there is a great opportunity for BookMyShow and Paytm both to upscale.

Since BookMyShow has raised a three-digit Series D round, the ongoing fight with Paytm would turn more fierce. Nevertheless, customers would rejoice while both players are expected to double down on cashback and other freebies. Going forward, it would be exciting to watch who scores lead on whom.

The development was first reported by Inc42.