Online booking enabler for hotel Commeasure raises $ 1M funding from Jungle Ventures, to expand clientele base by 10X
Business centric hotel search engine Commeasure has raised $1 million seed fund from Jungle Ventures, an entrepreneur backed venture firm that funds and helps early stage startups to scale across Asia Pacific region.
The company will deploy funds to accelerate its adoption amongst hotels across South East Asia (SEA) region with strong focus in India. Currently, it has 500 plus large and small hotels across India using its direct booking system.
Commeasure’s clientele base counts Lazylagoon (Goa), Edelweiss(Bali), Mapple (Bangalore) among several others. “We’ve experienced rapid growth since our launch in July 2014, our customer portfolio of 500+ large and small hotels across India, literally from Kashmir to the Andaman Islands and in SE Asia, confirms the need and efficacy of our offering,” said Amit Saberwal, CEO & Founder, Commeasure.
With this round the Noida-Singapore based company plans to implement its direct booking system to 5,000 hotels across SEA region.
Commeasure’s solution helps to address a growing challenge that hotels face with customer acquisition and retention. With customers checking for hotels and prices online, customer acquisition for smaller hotels is complicated. Current solutions are either too expensive or offer only part solutions.
Founded by AmitSaberwal and Kunwar Asheesh Saxena Commeasure lets hotels distribute their property on OTAs as well as their own website and mobile channels and not be solely reliant only on third party distributors.
Prior to founding Commeasure, Amit was Chief Business Officer - MakeMyTrip and was a part of the leadership team that took the company to the most successful IPO in three years on NASDAQ in 2010. Asheesh served as Director ( for online hotels) at MakeMyTrip.
“APAC’s fragmented lodging landscape still suffers from low online penetration compared to Europe and US, which suggests that it holds significant opportunity for growth. We are thrilled to partner with Commeasure as the company expands its offering across the Asia-Pacific region,” said Amit Anand, Founding Partner at Jungle Ventures who has previously led rounds in companies such as travelmob (Acquired by HomeAway), CatchThatBus and others.
Jungle is a Singapore based venture firm which earlier invested in Bangalore based Zipdial which was acquired by Twitter in January this year.
Online booking for hotels is growing fast expected to grow by nearly 30 percent in India. By 2015, online hotel gross bookings in APAC is estimated to reach $34.5 billion, a 51% increase over 2012. Bookings generated via hotel websites would be about $12.3 billion1. While mobile booking transactions are expected to more than double between 2014 and 2016 in the three main travel categories (air, hotel and car rental).