Hotel Quickly Ltd., a Hong Kong-based provider of a last-minute hotel booking platform in the Asia-Pacific region, raised US$4.5m in Series A-1 financing.
The round was led by GREE, with participation from William E. Heinecke, CEO and Chairman of Thai-based Minor International, through his family office. GREE recently launched its own Japan-based last-minute booking service, Tonight, and the investment forms the basis for a partnership between it and HotelQuickly aimed at enhancing their respective services through personnel exchange, the sharing of technical expertise, and other collaboration.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate product development, marketing, and hire to drive sales across Asia-Pacific and to secure its lead in the region.
Launched in March 2013 by Tomas Laboutka, CEO, HotelQuickly is a last-minute hotel booking app available for free for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry devices. The app offers discounted 3- to 5-star hotels in more than 100 destinations across Asia-Pacific. It has more than 150,000 registered users and 300,000 downloads in the markets where it is available, which include Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand.
The app supports English, traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesian, and Thai.
The company, which launched its application in March 2013, had raised a US$1.15m Series A round in August 2013.
FinSMEs
10/07/2014