Wudstay gets $3m funding from Mangrove Capital, Nimbuzz CEO

Wudstay, an online marketplace for budget accommodations, on Thursday said it has raised USD 3 million (about Rs 19 crore) in funding from former Skype investor, Mangrove Capital Partners and Nimbuzz CEO Vikas Saxena.

Available in Gurgaon and Jaipur, WudStay plans to expand to 65 cities in the next 18 months, the company said in a statement. The funds raised will be deployed in ramping up the technology platform and team building, it added.

Travellers can use WudStay to book budget accommodations online and through mobile, along with complimentary breakfast and wi-fi. It relies on its technology backbone for standardising its guest houses so the user experience is uniform across all of its accommodations in any cities, it said.

"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," Nimbuzz's Vikas Saxena said. An app version of Wudstay will be launched in August.

"Booking rooms in India through existing channels does not give one the confidence of getting value for money. Also, safety and security is a concern too. We intend to solve that through the technology we have built to standardise these accommodations," Wudstay founder and CEO Prafulla Mathur said.

Mathur had earlier founded a mobile technology company, Queppelin which included clients like Facebook, Snapdeal, Times of India, Gaana.com, Reliance Bigflix and others.

"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," Mangrove Capital Partners founder and CEO Mark Tluszcz said.