Wudstay, an online marketplace for budget accommodations announced a USD 3 Million round of funding from former Skype investor, Mangrove Capital Partners and Nimbuzz CEO Vikas Saxena.
Travellers can use WudStay to book accommodations online and through mobile at very affordable prices and also guaranteed a quality experience along with complimentary breakfast and wifi. WudStay relies heavily on its technology backbone for standardising its guest houses so the user experience is uniform across all of its accommodations in any cities.
Currently available in Gurgaon and Jaipur, WudStay plans to expand to 65 cities in the next 18 months. Funds raised will be deployed in ramping up the technology platform and team building.
Excited about the new venture in India, Mark Tluszcz, Founder & CEO, Mangrove Capital Partners said, “We had a great outcome in our earlier investment in India through Nimbuzz and wanted to keep that going. WudStay was obvious from the start: huge unstructured market, great founder and an opportunity to define the standard in budget hotel segment.”
Vikas Saxena, CEO, Nimbuzz, remarked, “In my past ventures I have looked at scenarios where tech advancements can disrupt a large inefficient market and make the services cheaper and better for the consumers. With Internet penetration reaching critical mass in emerging markets I think time is ripe to repeat the same in budget stays. . With 2015 travel market size in India hitting a mark of USD 70 Billion, there is a huge potential for travel technology platform that WudStay has built.’’
According to Prafulla Mathur, Founder & CEO, Wudstay, ‘’I travel a lot for business and leisure and one thing I learnt in that is booking rooms in India through existing channels does not give you the confidence of getting value for money. Additionally safety and security is a concern too. We intend to solve that through the technology we have built to standardise these accommodations so a user is always sure of a quality experience. It is great to have Mangrove and Vikas onboard as they bring their experience of consumer internet through brands like Skype, Wix and Nimbuzz. ’’
Prafulla Mathur has been a serial entrepreneur and had earlier founded one of the most prominent mobile technology company called Queppelin with clients including Facebook, Snapdeal, Times of India, Gaana.com, Reliance Bigflix, HomeShop18, TastyKhana and many more. He created a mobile product in 2011 which was showcased by Oracle at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona and was also a Red Herring Winner.