OYO Hotels & Homes said on Monday it had raised funding from U.S.-based accommodation platform Airbnb.
While the financial details of the deal were not disclosed, a source pegged the investment by Airbnb to be between $100 and $200 million.
As part of this ‘strategic investment’, both parties are exploring opportunities to collaborate on a range of projects, including making OYO’s accommodations available on Airbnb’s platform, the source added.
“As the sixth-largest hotel chain operator in the world, we, at OYO Hotels & Homes, are committed to offering our guests and travellers around the world, great quality living spaces. We are happy to have Airbnb as our partner in this vision,” Maninder Gulati, global chief strategy officer at OYO Hotels & Homes, said in a statement.
Mr. Gulati added that Airbnb’s strong global footprint and access to local communities were expected to open up new opportunities for OYO Hotels & Homes to strengthen and grow.
Stating that emerging markets like India and China were some of Airbnb’s fastest-growing, Greg Greeley, President of Homes, Airbnb said that in many of these markets, OYO is empowering local hospitality entrepreneurs to provide more options to travellers.
OYO, which is backed by investors such as SoftBank Group, Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Hero Enterprise and China Lodging Group, is currently present in more than 500 cities across 10 countries, including India, China, Malaysia, Nepal, the U.K., UAE, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Japan. It has more than 18,000 franchised or leased hotels in its chain and over 6,000 homes.
