Technology-enabled Treebo hotel raises a fresh round of $16 million in Series B led by Bertelsmann India Investment(BII) with existing investors, SAIF Partners and Matrix Partners India. The funding round would be primarily used to scale their existing network four times to 12K rooms over 450 properties over the next year.

The deal focuses on how despite the tough funding environment companies with positive economics and a lower market share can raise capital money.

“Treebo has shown a tremendous ability to drive steady scale, and healthy unit economics at the same time,” said Tarun Davda, managing director at Matrix Partners which co-led an Rs 38-crore round with SAIF Partners in June 2015.

Treebo was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Gupta and Rahul Chaudhary, ex-Myntra executives along with MakeMyTrip’s Kadam Jeet Jain. The company offers budget hotel rooms to travellers in the price range of 1,000-3,000 where it is able to drive around an average of 75% occupancy.

“Over the past one year, they have maintained razor sharp focus on delivering a great guest experience, and have extensively deployed technology in all parts of their operations to accomplish this objective,” said Pankaj Makkar, MD of Bertelsmann.

Treebo recently had come up with an app Bumblebee to sort its operation handling which followed a not-so-conventional approach. Another on the list was a mystery audit program named ‘Friends of Treebo’ where registered members would choose to stay as impromptu representatives and give feedback to the Treebo properties to help them take quick corrective measures.

Budget stay aggregators like OYO, that spread operations in North East earlier this year, and Treebo collate 10-30 rooms from smaller hotels and standardise them with basic amenities like TV, air-conditioning, complimentary breakfast and WiFi.

Source: EconomicTimes/VCCircle

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Ixigo, the leading travel search engine based in Gurgaon, is planning to raise $20 million by early next year to further expand its user base and distribution. It has successfully raised $18 million from investors like Saif Partners, MakeMyTrip and Micromax.

To obtain more financial backing, Ixigo is planning to include a fresh set of investors as it enters new segments such as budget hotels, packages and cab services. Elaborating on this business development, Alok Bajpai, the CEO and Co-Founder of the company, quoted:

“We are in talks with existing and new investors. There are plans to sign term sheets by early next year to raise an additional $20 million as we also plan to grow in the B2B space.”

Investors like MakeMyTrip had already dropped stake in the travel search portal from 19.9 per cent to 15 per cent with new investors like Micromax which invested into the company in June this year.

Alok Bajpai added:

“We did raise about $18 million in 2011 with the exit of our angel investors with Saif Partners picking up 40 per cent stake along with Make My Trip whose stake has come down to 15 percent as of now.’

To strengthen its market leadership in mobile travel services for middle-class users, Ixigo is looking forward to an app-based distribution model. Micromax will have pre-embedded Ixigo app on its new model of phones and will thus serve as a major distribution partner for the travel search engine. Ixigo will also create an app based distribution model through third-party apps to increase the distribution base.

Ixigo is exploring new verticals to expand its business. It has added a new segment of hotels called ‘Super Value Hotels’ to attract more people from smaller cities. Its ‘super value hotels’ compares deals across branded budget hotel providers such as OYO Rooms, Zo Rooms, Vista Rooms and independent hotels.

With many leading brands financially backing the company, the travel search engine might easily hit its target of $20 million in the next few months. It is quite clear that Ixigo is aiming to be one of biggest influencers of the travel industry with its expansion and distribution plans.

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Treebo Hotels, Bengaluru based budget hotel chain, kickstarted Treebotsav campaign welcoming the arrival of the festive season. Customers can avail Flipkart gift vouchers worth 50% of the prepaid hotel room booking amount done in October 2015 for check-ins between 1^st October, 2015 and 30^th November, 2015.

Details of the offer:

This exclusive offer is applicable on the base room tariffs only excluding taxes, laundry, food and other applicable charges.  The customers will have to use the coupon code ‘TBO50’ while booking the hotel at the Treebo website. They are required to stay in their respective hotels for a period of atleast 2 nights. This two month long campaign will permit the patrons to utilize their gift vouchers upto Rs. 1,500 per booking. This will reach them within a week after the checkout from the hotel. For the convenience of customers, the customers can utilize the total voucher value on multiple financial transactions during the validity period.

According to the report, Sidharth Gupta, the Co-founder of Treebo Hotels stated:

“We Indians love to travel and during the festive season, our propensity to travel increases. It is that time of the year when people love to visit different cities making the most of the holiday season and book their hotel rooms well in advance. They also tend to catch up with their loved ones and shop for gifts to give away for the special occasion. Thus, we introduced our Treebotsav offer to give them the pleasure of both.”

Treebo, founded in March 2015 by Sidharth Gupta, Rahul Chaudhary and Kadam Jeet Jain, has particularly curated rooms across eight cities viz Bengaluru (Head Office), Delhi, Jaipur, Mumbai, Goa , Hyderabad, Mysore and Chennai. For nation-wide expansion, Matrix Partners India and SAIF Partners have funded this start-up with a sum of $6 million (Read: Travel Startup funding in India by the numbers). With the festive season approaching, we will surely see more travel brands come up with tempting offers and interesting campaigns.

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