WudStay, an online market place to book budget accommodation, aims to take standardised affordable accommodations in South India to more people.
The company, which boasts of 350 hotels across 37 cities, has also co-branded with Microsoft for application services on mobile platforms and has WudStay routers for equal distribution of bandwidth in a property.
The company has raised $3 million from the European venture capital company Mangrove that had also funded Skype. In addition to Mangrove, Simile Venture Partners also invested in WudStay in May 2015 in the seed round of funding. It had raised funds from Vikas Saxena, CEO of messaging app Nimbuzz, in July.
Disrupting the traditional ways of doing business, where hotels price themselves out of the market due to low occupancy, WudStay aims to solve the problem, thus bringing down cost of rooms, ensuring better occupancy. It borrowed the idea from a Chinese firm’s model, considered suitable for emerging countries.
Prafulla Mathur, founder and CEO, said, “Unlike travel portals that list properties, WudStay follows a checkpoint approach.” It’s the responsibility of WudStay to facilitate customers’ booking to checkout services.
Meanwhile, Mathur said more funding is in the pipeline. With a technology background, Mathur had worked with Lehman Brothers and Bank of Scotland. He quit in 2010, to start his venture Queppelin, a mobile app developer. He believed there was a lack of standardisation in the hotel sector, and floated WudStay after visiting Haridwar for a ritual.