Holidu raises £35.5m Series C financing

Holidu, a tech company in the holiday rental industry, announced today that it has closed a £35.5m Series C funding round. The round was led by Prime Ventures, with participation from coparion and MairDuMont Ventures. All existing investors, including EQT Ventures, Venture Stars, Senovo and business angel Chris Hitchen, also participated in the round.

Holidu was founded in 2014 by Johannes and Michael Siebers following a frustrating experience while booking a holiday rental for a surfing trip to Portugal. The brothers spent hours browsing through dozens of websites to find the right accommodation and realised that some of the rentals were offered on multiple websites for different prices.

In addition, booking a rental was difficult because the calendars shown on websites were often not up-to-date. Johannes and Michael decided to solve these problems with technology and took on the mission to finally make the search and booking of holiday rentals easy.

Since then, Holidu’s search engine is now active in 21 markets and serves more than 10 million visitors per month. With its proprietary image recognition technology, Holidu compares the prices of more than 15 million rental properties across 600 different websites including Airbnb, Booking.com and Homeaway. This enables users to save up to 55% on their booking. Earlier this year, Holidu built on its organic growth by acquiring its Spanish competitor Hundredrooms.

The new funding will be used to further drive product development, both of the Holidu website and the Bookiply software. In addition, the company will grow its inventory by increasing the portfolio of connected Holidu partners and rapidly ramping up the number of holiday rental owners working with Bookiply. To achieve this, the company also plans to open multiple regional offices.

Johannes Siebers, CEO and co-founder of Holidu, said: “We are thrilled to work with such a strong group of investors including Prime Ventures and EQT Ventures. The funding will accelerate our growth and help us create more unique value for our partners, travellers and holiday rental owners.”

Nick Kalliagkopoulos, Principal at Prime Ventures, commented: “Holidu has developed products that users love on both sides of the holiday rental market. We were impressed by the technology and customer focus of the team and we are excited to partner with them to further scale the business.”