SoftBank leads $100m round for India's Oyo Rooms

Existing investors Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Ventures India, also took part in the round.

The start-up launched in 2012 as Oravel.com, a marketplace for boutique hotels and serviced apartments for short- and mid-term holiday rentals. However, the original site shut down last year, and was replaced with OyoRooms.com.

OyoRooms has a business model comparable to taxi-booking platform Uber, with small teams of 20 people in charge of each city, and a large centralized customer care center accounting for the bulk of its 1,200-strong workforce. The sites currently features 13,000 rooms across 70 cities, but is aiming to reach 50,000 units in 200 locations by the end of this year.

OyoRooms previously raised INR1.5 billion ($24 million) in a round led by Greenoaks in March with participation from Lightspeed, Sequoia and DSG Consumer Partners. The firm received its initial seed round in 2012 from a group including eight angel investors. Then in May last year it raised $650,000 from DSG and Lightspeed.

Another online accommodation aggregator, Stayzilla.com, raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Nexus Venture Partners with Matrix India earlier this year. More recently, Tiger Global Management and Orios Venture Partners provided a Series A round for Zostel Hospitality, the start-up behind online budget hotel booking platform Zo Rooms.

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• Topics
• Technology
• Real estate
• South Asia
• Consumer
• Real estate
• India
• Softbank
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Sequoia Capital
• TMT