Zen Rooms, a budget hotel network targeted predominantly at Southeast Asia, has closed a $4.1 million Series A round to expand its presence in the region.
The company, which was first founded by Rocket Internet in 2015, said the capital was provided by Korea’s Redbadge Pacific and SBI Investment Korea, with participation from existing investor Asia Pacific Internet Group, the joint venture from Rocket Internet and Ooredoo. The money takes Zen Rooms to $8 million from investors to date including a previously undisclosed seed round.
Zen Rooms is one of a number of companies to emerge over the past two years aiming to make hotel bookings in emerging markets more organized, cost effective and of better quality. To do so, they create a network of partner hotels that guarantee a certain quality of room and comfort, whilst providing a platform for booking rooms that might otherwise be hard/impossible to find online.
India’s OYO Rooms, which has raised over $180 million, pioneered the concept, but Zen Rooms is among a number of copycats to have taken the model to Southeast Asia. Others that have raised venture capital include RedDoorz, Nida Rooms and Tinggal. Zen Rooms primarily focuses on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, but it also includes hotels in Brazil, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong among its coverage.
Zen Rooms co-founder and global MD Nathan Boublil told TechCrunch that the company is seeing progress in Southeast Asia, which has a cumulative population of over 600 million. Online where online travel spending in the region is forecast to increase from $22 million in 2015 to $90 million in 2025,…