SPUN, the Indonesian visa startup, runs its application flow inside the checkouts of Klook, Traveloka, Tiket and Nusatrip, and reports a 99% approval rate on the visa applications it files. The company was founded by Christa Sabathaly, its chief executive, and Dilla Anindita, two former colleagues from LINE Indonesia.

In January the company closed a USD 1.8 million seed funding round led by Genesia Ventures, as TNGlobal reported the round. The money is for expanding the product across Southeast Asia.

How it started

Sabathaly and Anindita met at LINE Indonesia. Before that, Sabathaly worked at Google, and Anindita was a product lead at Grab and Cookpad. All three are consumer products where a slow form is a lost user, and that is the background the two brought to visas.

The visa is the one step of a trip that stayed manual. A traveller in Southeast Asia can book a flight, a hotel and an airport transfer in one session on an OTA. The visa still meant a separate form, a separate agent and a separate wait, with rules that change by passport, destination and purpose. Agung Hadinegoro, Partner at Antler Indonesia, put the size of it in one line: “visa friction is not an Indonesia-only problem”.

How OTA visa integration works

SPUN supports more than 300 visa types across more than 90 countries. Its visa flow is embedded in Klook, Traveloka, Tiket and Nusatrip, so the traveller stays inside the OTA’s own checkout and SPUN handles the application behind the page. The OTA offers the visa. SPUN does the work.

The company calls the product AI-enabled visa infrastructure. Takahiro Suzuki, General Partner at Genesia Ventures, said SPUN “is building the intelligence and workflow layer that helps standardize visa processes across Southeast Asia”. The word that matters is layer. SPUN is not a visa agency with a website. It is the workflow underneath other companies’ websites.

The business

SPUN reports a 99% visa application approval rate and more than 200 corporate customers, alongside the four OTA integrations. That gives it two channels: travellers who buy a visa at an OTA checkout, and companies that send staff across borders and want every application handled the same way.

Genesia Ventures led the seed round. Antler, Spiral Ventures, Iterative and Kopital Ventures joined, with Kum Hong Siew, the former Managing Director of Airbnb China, as an angel investor. Sabathaly said the company is “creating infrastructure that can scale regionally while delivering reliability for both individual travelers and travel partners”. Partners is the word for the OTAs and the corporates. SPUN’s customer is as often a platform as a person.

The next twelve months

The seed round is for taking the product across Southeast Asia, and the investor quotes point the same way: Suzuki on standardising visa processes across the region, Hadinegoro on a problem that is not Indonesia-only. The measures to watch are the OTA list beyond the four names and the corporate count beyond 200.

The nearer date is WiT Singapore. SPUN received the AirAsia MOVE award in the 2026 Global Startup Pitch, a return flight from anywhere in Asia to WiT Singapore, which puts the founders in the same room as the region’s OTAs, airlines and investors.

Who to watch. Organisers building panels on distribution in Southeast Asia have a candidate here: two founders from LINE, Google, Grab and Cookpad whose product sits inside four OTA checkouts and more than 200 corporate accounts. Founders who sell infrastructure to the platforms, rather than compete with them, bring a different conversation to a stage than another OTA keynote.

Key takeaway

SPUN shows that an OTA does not have to build the visa step to own it. Rent the layer, keep the customer inside your checkout, and let a specialist carry the rules for 300 visa types across 90 countries. Founders can copy the shape of the deal: pick the one manual step left in a booking flow, build the workflow underneath it, and sell it to the platforms rather than against them. We will be watching the OTA list and the corporate count over the next year.

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Budget hotel startup RedDoorz has closed $11 million in new funding to expand its network of budget hotels and guest houses throughout the Southeast Asian region.

The round is described as being pre-Series B and it comes from existing investors Sushquehanna International Group (SIG), World Bank’s IFC, InnoVen Capital and Jungle Ventures, with new investors DeepSky Capital, FengHe Group and Hendale Capital joining.The cash will let the company expand operations into new cities and new countries, including Thailand, where there are plenty of young travellers looking for budget hotel rooms

The company, led by CEO Amit Saberwal, brings together budget hotel owners under the RedDoorz banner and books their rooms via an online marketplace. Through the site, hotel owners get access to guests, and travellers can rest assured that RedDoorz-branded hotel rooms have clean sheets, decent internet, and trained staff. This concept was initially pioneered by India’s OYO, which is backed by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, but RedDoorz is one of half a dozen or so venture-backed efforts bringing the model to Southeast Asia.

Image source: cnbc.com

The company launched in Indonesia, before using earlier funding rounds to expand to the Philippines and Singapore, where the company just leased its own hotel to run. The company had closed a $5 million Series A at the end of 2016. Initially, it closed a $1.4 million seed round and it added $1 million in venture debt last year.

As it stands in Indonesia, where RedDoorz has been the longest and where it has most of its 500 properties — it claims to offer 3,000 rooms across 16 cities — the vast majority of customers are local and using the company’s Android app, rather than the tourist crowd. That crowd is roughly split between those on business and on leisure.

The Southeast Asian budget hotel market is currently worth between US$15 million to US$20 million, according to reporting by The Edge Markets in 2017. The real beneficiaries of this market are booking platforms that redirect tourists to budget hotels that offer the best deals. Most booking platforms in the region employ a standardised model, aggregating available rooms in hotels within a certain city and forming a network of available rooms across multiple cities. Some booking platforms are trying to creatively improvise their services by innovating around evolving customer needs, such as speed of booking, that RedDoorz particularly focuses on. The RedDoorz website is optimised to ensure that the booking form is displayed prominently on the landing page, which keeps guests focused on completing their booking.

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Over the past decade or so, there has been a great deal of interest in the travel, hotels, and travel accommodations sectors, especially by startup investors. The travel industry has become extremely competitive and hundreds of startups have created entirely new markets for accommodations, even as many others work on new ways of booking travel and making it accessible to more people, primarily using technology.

This year was bigger and better for the global travel industry. According to CB Insights, while travel tech had an uneven year, emerging markets stood out as bright spots. As of October 2017, deal activity was on track to surpass last year’s record-breaking 316 deals, while equity funding in 2017 YTD had already nearly matched the 2016 total.

Let’s take a look at some of the top travel deals of the year:

1. Airbnb remained an investor favourite (San-Francisco, Online marketplace and hospitality service)

Sharing economy behemoth Airbnb claimed one of the top spots for the largest deals to travel tech startups, closing its Series F round raising roughly $450 million and taking their Series F total to a little over $1 billion. This valued the travel giant at approximately $31 billion.

2. Traveloka raised US$350 million (Indonesia, Online travel agency) 

Southeast Asia’s leading online travel company Traveloka raised US$350 million from Expedia. The round valued the company at $2 billion, making it the second most valuable tech startup in Indonesia.The partnership gave Traveloka travellers access to a diverse set of international accommodations, and conversely, Expedia managed to leverage Traveloka’s local knowledge to deepen its presence in Southeast Asia.

3. OYO closed a $250 million funding (India, Budget-hotel aggregator)

With plans to expand abroad, starting with countries in Southeast Asia, and hopes of doubling their revenue in 2018, budget hotel startup OYO continued to remain an investor favourite. The company closed a $250 million Series D funding round, backed by Sequoia Capital India and SoftBank Group, among others. It then followed this funding with an additional $10 million in funding from Chinese hotel management firm China Lodging Group.

4. Xiaozhu gets Jack Ma’s blessing with $120 million in funding (China, Home-sharing platform)

Another Chinese counterpart of Airbnb, home-sharing site Xiaozhu received $120 million in funding. Yunfeng Capital, run by famous investor Jack Ma, led the investment. Joy Capital, Morningside Ventures, and Capital Today also participated in the Series E round, and placed a more than $1 billion valuation on the company. This Beijing-based startup is more like the original peer-to-peer short-term rental model that Airbnb pioneered.

5. Klook net $60 million (Hong Kong, Tours and Activities marketplace)

Hong-Kong based Klook, a service for finding and booking travel activities, closed a $60 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia China. Existing backers Matrix Partners and Welight Capital, a firm founded by former Tencent executives, also took part in the funding round. The company, which introduced services such as local transfer options and WiFi device rental, would also soon add options for restaurants, wellness, shopping and more.

6. Goomo inched ahead with a $50 million investment (India, Omnichannel travel-tech)

Omnichannel travel-tech startup Goomo raised $50 million from a Mauritius-based fund manager, Emerging India, to build Goomo’s online platform, products, marketing, and establishing its offline partner network. Founded in March 2017 by Varun Gupta, Goomo has launched its services with bookings for flights and holidays, and trade fairs and will soon be expanding it to include hotels, trains, buses and visas online.

7. Trip.com raised $39 million; got sold to CTrip (California, Online travel agency)

CA-based travel planning and local discovery app Trip.com had raised $39 million in funding, from Expedia, Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe, Square CEO Keith Rabois and angel investor Oren Zeev. However, in probably one of the most spoken-about buyouts of the year, the startup was lapped up by China’s largest online travel agent, Ctrip for an undisclosed amount.

8. Treebo snapped up $34 million in funding (India, Budget Hotel Chain)

Budget hotel chain Treebo snapped up $34 million in fresh round of funding. The Series C funding came more than a year after Treebo had secured its Series B funding. Hong Kong-based hedge funds Ward Ferry Management and Karst Peak Capital led the latest round.

9. GoFro received a $10 million backing (India, Tours and Activities marketplace)

Holiday marketplace GoFro received $10 million in funding from Japanese major H.I.S. Co., Ltd., a travel agency with its headquarter in Tokyo and India’s largest OTA MakeMyTrip. The company said it plans to utilize these funds by building its tech platform, expansion to new geographies and growing its supply and agent network.

10. GuestReady added $3 million to its war-chest (London, Rental property management)

GuestReady, the close contender to Airbnb that manages rentals on behalf of property owners, closed a $3 million seed round to grow its presence in Europe and Asia. The round was led by Impulse VC, the Russian fund that is backed by billionaire Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, with participation from Australia’s Xponova and Boost Heroes, a VC led by Lastminute founder Fabio Cannavale. Existing backers Swiss Founders Fund and Senn and Partner were among others in the round.

What are the other deals that grabbed your attention? Let us know.

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