This month has witnessed a lot of exciting things in the Hong Kong startup community, today we are thrilled to share another hot news with you. HotelQuickly, our local hero closes its series A round after raising USD 1.13M (HKD 9M ). Accordingly, the funds will be used for further expansion within the Asia-Pacific region and to accelerate product development which came from several angel investors, including Boon Hwee Koh, former Chairman of Singtel, Singapore Airlines and DBS Bank, and current board member of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings.
This is indeed a big thing to celebrate for this rapidly growing Hong Kong startup and for the whole community too. If it is the first time you hear about HotelQuickly, just quickly take a look at our previous interview with them.
Based in Hong Kong, HotelQuickly has been building up the largest last-minute hotel booking smartphone app for Asia, started in 2012, and launched in March 2013. Since its launching, the company has been getting good traction, currently it owns active users in 11 countries, with over 150,000 downloads. Paired with 300 hotels in 10 countries in six languages aside from English, it wins great popularity in Southeast Asia without surprise because of the broad use of mobile applications here.
According to the Co-founder Raphael Cohen, HotelQuickly’s business model has been getting good traction in general over the past few weeks. Out in this market, its US competitor Hotel Tonight just closed series D round of $45M, European peer Blink Booking just got acquired by Groupon. The team is sure that they are now in a very hot industry as the first mover for the Asia-Pacific region.
With spontaneous travels, weekend getaways, and short-term business trips becoming more popular across the region, this app clearly hits a major nerve of our time. Notedly, the startup has already been named Top 100 Red Herring company in Asia of 2013. Good luck to HotelQuickly!
(Photo Credit: BigStock)
