The hospitality business has been hit severely by the Covid-19 pandemic and budget accommodation hotel brand Treebo is no exception. The company is having a tough time as revenues have dried up since March without clarity on when things will come back to normal.
To keep the business running, Treebo raised Rs 43.5 crore worth bridge round last month from its existing investors Bertelsmann BV, SAIF Partners, and Matrix Partners. The company has now raised a Rs 10.26 crore worth tranche from a list of marquee angel investors as a part of its ongoing Series D round.
According to regulatory filings, Deepak Paresaken invested Rs 7.5 crore along with a dozen high net worth individuals. The list includes Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Saikiran K, one of the co-founders of xto10x and Goldman Sachs’ executive director Prasoon Agarwal. Ramesh Mangaleswaran, a senior partner at Mckinsey and Nivesh Seth, a senior product manager at Amazon, among others also participated.
It’s worth noting that the existing backers had invested in Treebo’s Series D round last month at a discount of over Rs 100 crore in valuation. It was valued at Rs 513 crore in the first tranche of the round, and this time it barely grew by 1.9% to Rs 523 crore.
Treebo has been unable to close any substantial funding round since its $34 million Series C round in 2017. Experts tracking the budget accommodation space emphasize that it’s very tough to convince new investors to join Treebo’s Series D round.
“Fundraising for any hotel brand is challenging at the moment as the pandemic has crippled the sector. There is almost no revenue in the last four months, and the situation is unlikely to improve drastically in the ongoing fiscal,” said one of the prime consulting firms in the travel tech domain on the condition of anonymity.
Like other budget hotel brands (except Oyo that has a deep-pocket), Treebo is plagued with low or no demand and certainly doesn’t have a long runway. While these small tranches will help the company to run operations smoothly, the company requires to raise a large round.
