WudStay eyes 10,000-room inventory

It is currently present in 35 cities with 3,000 rooms in its network

Gurgaon-based budget hotel aggregator WudStay is planning to expand its footprint to 65 cities across the country, with an inventory of 10,000 rooms by mid-2016, according to founder and chief executive Prafulla Mathur.

“We are focusing on setting the gold standard, right from the booking process to checking out, for budget hotels in India, where the travel market size is set to touch the $75-billion mark in 2015,” Mathur told Business Standard.

Incepted in April  by Mathur, who earlier founded mobile app development firm Queppelin, WudStay currently has presence in 35 cities with 3,000 rooms in its network.

WudStay had in May 2015 raised an undisclosed seed round of funding from Simile Ventures, and $3 million in its first round from Mangrove Capital Partners and Vikas Saxena, chief executive officer of messaging app Nimbuzz, in July this year.

"To fuel our expansion, we are looking at raising funds in Series-A in a few months from now, with participation from both existing and new investors," Mathur said, adding that the company would be launching a mobile app on Android, iOS and Windows platforms within the next few weeks.

In August 2015, WudStay had acquired Gurgaon-based Awesome Stays, a two-year-old offline hotel aggregator, for an undisclosed sum to expand into markets like Varanasi, Mumbai, Goa, Dehradun, Pune and Mumbai.

"We are open to similar acquisitions," Mathur said, while declining to comment further.