AxisRooms, a technology led, hotel inventory distribution company, announced that it has raised its first round of funding from Seedfund Advisors. Founded by Anil Kumar Prasanna and 
Ravi Taneja and supported by core team formation of Leema Rosali, Rahul Agrawal and Rahul Goyal. AxisRooms offers complete hotel distribution SaaS solutions to manage a hotel’s channel management, booking engine and corporate bookings. AxisRooms aims to be India’s largest distribution platform for hotels and will be using the funds raised towards product enhancement and client acquisition.
Bharati Jacob, Partner , Seefund Advisors, “ Hotels sell through multiple channels – online, offline, walk-in etc and they have lacked a system that allows them to manage inventory across these disparate channels. AxisRooms fills in the gap. What really excited us about the investment, apart from the large market, is the team. The team at AxisRooms comes with rich experience in the travel industry and therefore they have created a product that addresses the true needs of the industry. They are in the process of consolidating their offerings and we at Seedfund look forward to being a part of their growth.
Anil Kumar, Founder, AxisRooms, “With an increase in independent Hotels and easy accessibility to internet, Indian hotel industry has experienced the power of online booking in the past few years. AxisRooms products are aimed at offering an affordable and efficient solution to the hotels and helping them reach to a larger base of customers across India. itvoice
The company at present offers three key products – Channel Manager, Booking Engine and Corporate and SME Tools. The Channel Manager provides a single platform for hotels to manage inventory and pricing with all online travel portals. The platform also helps hotels to increase their distribution and revenue. The Booking Engine on the other hand allows hotels to take direct bookings through their own website 24 x7. Corporate and SME tool empowers the employees of a company to manage their own bookings, within the defined parameters of the firm, thereby reducing the need for an extra resource for managing the bookings. AxisRooms offers SaaS solutions and hence no upfront investment is required. It offers a flexible payment based on transaction fees and subscription fees and this makes it easy to adopt the technology for all types of hotels from stand alone home stays to multi-hotel chains.
AxisRooms currently partners with Expedia, Booking.com, Agoda, Makemytrip, TravelGuru, Cleartrip, GoIbibo, Splendia, HotelTravel.com, Travelocity, Hotels4u (a Thomas Cook Group) etc, and has 265 hotel clients using its platform. It aims to increase the number of hotels to 5000 by 2015.
Seedfund Advisors:
Seedfund Advisors, founded in 2006 by Pravin Gandhi, Bharati Jacob and Mahesh Murthy,is one of India’s most active and best-known early-stage venture capital fund, with operations in Bombay, Bangalore and New Delhi.
Seedfund invests in entrepreneurs and companies that help “create the new India” and its investment strategy is to invest in and mentor entrepreneurs and businesses based in India and primarily aiming to serve the enormous and growing Indian market. Seedfund actively looks at companies that have the potential to become leaders in new market sectors and the investment amount per company ranges from Rs. 1 cr to Rs. 25 cr.
Seedfund Advisors has made over 27 investments across 2 funds over the last 6 years and has had a couple of very profitable exits. Seedfund investments include redBus (www.redbus.in), Carwale, Afaqs, EduSports, Frontier Markets, Heckyl, Jeevanti Healthcare, Level10 Comics, mydentist, Nevales Networks, Printo, Fetise, RupeeTalk, Sportskeeda, ThinkLabs, Innoz, Chumbak, DoneByNone and Vaatsalya.
