Shanda leads $5.6m round for Indonesia's Nida
Indonesian hotel reservation services provider Nida Rooms has raised a $5.6 million Series A round of funding led by China’s Shanda Group.
Additional unnamed Southeast Asian investors also participated in the round, according to a release. Nida’s other VC backers include Convergence Ventures and CyberAgent Ventures, which led a $4.2 million pre-Series A round last year. Including the previous round and a seed round in 2015 Nida has now raised $11.1 million in all.
The company will use the new capital to improve its technology and expand its network of hotels. Since its founding in 2015, Nida has partnered with more than 4,000 hotels in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines, and plans to enter Singapore. It targets budget travelers and aims to provide much-needed consistency of service across Southeast Asia’s highly fragmented hotel business.
While Nida has a number of competitors seeking to capitalize on the growing interest in budget tourism in Southeast Asia – including Zenrooms, a start-up backed by Germany’s Rocket Internet – relatively few have received VC backing. One exception is MG Group, an Indonesia-headquartered business-to-business “bedbank” that supplies hotel rooms across Southeast Asia to travel agents, aggregators and tour operators and which received an investment of undisclosed size from Northstar Group last year.
“Nida has developed a business model that enables the company to quickly build a highly scalable platform with a strong brand by effectively addressing the needs of travelers and local hotels in the fragmented, less digitalized yet large and rapidly growing economy hotel sector in Southeast Asia,” said Shanda President Robert Chiu. “We think the addressable opportunities for NIDA Rooms will become even greater as the brand becomes stronger and stronger over time.”
Shanda is the investment arm of Chinese online gaming company Shanda Interactive Entertainment. It supports start-ups in the financial services, technology and healthcare sectors worldwide.
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