Inc42 Daily Brief
Stay Ahead With Daily News & Analysis on India’s Tech & Startup Economy
Matrix Partners India and SAIF Partners has co-led a $6 Mn round in Treebo Hotels, a tech-enabled chain of hotels offering quality accommodation to travellers at affordable prices. The newly raised funds will be used for expanding its network of hotels, developing state-of-the-art technology and hiring top talent.
Treebo Hotels was founded in March 2015 by Sidharth Gupta and Rahul Chaudhary, and ex-VP Engineering of MyGola, Kadam Jeet Jain. Before launching this venture, Sidharth and Rahul worked as Vice-Presidents at Flipkart-Myntra leading several strategic initiatives for the group and were colleagues at McKinsey & Company before that.
Treebo is a chain of affordable, comfortable, and reliable hotels providing genuine value for money to travellers, it partners with small, standalone hotels and helps them improve their service quality standards and also market themselves more effectively.
“Currently there are upwards of 10 lakh budget hotel rooms in India. But 95% of them are in the unorganized segment. Therefore, despite the availability of online booking options and third party reviews, the lack of quality assurance continues to be an unsolved problem for the traveller in this segment. This is the problem we are focused on solving. Our hotels come with an unprecedented ‘100% Quality Guarantee’. We believe there is a huge untapped opportunity in this space and ability to deliver great customer experience will be the key success factor.” said Sidharth Gupta, co-founder of Treebo.
The startup currently has a inventory of over 200 carefully curated rooms in Bangalore in a short span of two months. The company plans to take this number to 5,000 rooms across 20 cities.
“The budget hotel segment in India will continue to experience strong growth driven by growth in both business and leisure travel. The model adopted by Treebo has already seen tremendous success in China, which until a decade back was an unorganized market similar to what we see in India today. We are confident that Treebo can emulate that success in India and unlock immense value by solving a genuine problem faced by travellers today.” said Mayank Khanduja, Vice-President, SAIF Partners.
This investment comes in at a time when other startups are also raising whooping funding rounds; Oyo raised over $25Mn Sequoia Capital and others, Zostel got funded and launched Zo Rooms, Fabhotels got 5 Mn from Accel & Kalaari, ZenRoom raising $1 Mn.
Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.