Munich-based software and services vacation rental startup, Holidu, has topped up its coffers with an oversubscribed €104 million (~$102 million) Series E funding round of equity and debt, led by existing investor 83North, after seeing its year-over-year revenue grow 100% in 2021. Read the article about 43m series 100m lundentechcrunch.
The round saw a mix of other existing and new investors chipping in, including in the latter camp Northzone, HV Capital, Vintage Investment Partners and Commonfund Capital, and with (in the former) Prime Ventures, EQT Ventures, coparion, Senovo, Lios Ventures and Possible Ventures.
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The €100 million raise also includes a chunk of venture debt — €25 million — that’s been put up by Claret Capital and Silicon Valley Bank. So the equity component of the Series E comprises €75 million.
While travel startups were hit hard by coronavirus lockdowns in the early wave of the pandemic, vacation rentals picked up fairly quickly as lockdowns eased later on in 2020 and 2021, and as platforms retooled to cater to reconfigured demand from travelers opting for more domestic breaks over going farther afield, for example.
Holiday homes were also better positioned than other travel options like hotels (or, er, cruise ships) to offer attractive private spaces where people could feel safer about taking a break even as vaccine rollouts were still ramping up. Holidu and its investors are banking on that increased demand sticking around.
The German startup tells TechCrunch travel and booking patterns have now largely returned to resembling the pre-pandemic picture from 2019, with a rise in international (vs. domestic) travel bookings. It also says holiday makers are feeling more comfortable about planning ahead again and back to booking around a month in advance versus the shorter timeframes people switched to during the height of COVID-19 uncertainty.
Post-pandemic (or, well, post-the-peak-of-the-crisis), demand for travel has rebounded fiercely as plenty of people hankered to finally get away again — which is reflected in the larger growth Holidu booked in 2021 (100%) vs. 2020 (when it was up around 50% y-o-y).
It says its vacation rentals metasearch engine, which compares listings across over 1,500 websites, reached more than 110 million visitors in the last 12 months. And — with fresh funding in its back pocket — Holidu is gearing up to further press on the growth gas by expanding its rollout of local office locations to support its market outreach efforts.
A second strand of its business is aimed at increasing supply via a software and services play, called Bookiply, targeting vacation rental hosts — helping them get their properties online by streamlining administration and supporting them to grow bookings.
The startup says the unit grew 13x between 2019 and 2022. In 2021 specifically, Bookiply’s revenue growth was 4.4x — and in the first nine months of 2022 its revenues have grown 3.3x. While the number of managed Bookiply homes has stacked up from 5,000 three years ago to nearly 20,000 now, it sees plenty of room to keep building that out.
“As a group we are growing at a high double-digit rate,” CEO and co-founder, Johannes Siebers, told TechCrunch.
“We see that our company delivers true value to hosts and guests, which is reflected in our very strong host retention and guest satisfaction. We will now scale our region-by-region approach into Europe’s large and attractive hosting market. This financing round is a great vote of confidence in the current environment. We are on the path to build a big company,” he added in a statement.