ZUZU Hospitality, a Singapore-headquartered platform focused on revenue management and distribution for independent hotels across Southeast Asia and India, has secured US$5.9 million in Series B extension funding.
Wavemaker Growth, the growth fund of long-time backer Wavemaker Partners, led the round. Existing investors Velocity Ventures and Vulpes Ventures and new investor Latin Leap participated.
This money will accelerate the deployment and scaling of ZUZU’s AI-powered revenue management platform RevMate, expand data capabilities, and scale its go-to-market efforts.
The hospitality sector is entering a new phase of digital transformation driven by AI. Independent hotels, which constitute the vast majority of the market, face the significant risk of being left behind. Unlike their larger counterparts with dedicated revenue management teams, these properties often lack the necessary expertise and tools to harness AI’s full potential.
ZUZU Hospitality provides a proprietary all-in-one hotel operating system ( including RevMate and a payments platform) to allow hotels to manage guest and channel partner payments seamlessly.
The core of ZUZU’s RevMate AI platform lies in its proprietary dataset, a collection of booking patterns, pricing decisions, and market performance from its 3,000 hotel partners in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
According to the firm, the hotel partners report an average 8x return on investment.
Vikram Malhi, founder and CEO of ZUZU Hospitality, commented, “We’re witnessing the most significant transformation in hospitality since the internet. AI is reshaping how demand is predicted and revenue is optimised. Our mission has always been to empower independent hoteliers–the heart of this industry–who lack the resources of large chains.”
“The foundation of this mission is our unique data advantage. We’ve built a proprietary dataset from over 3,000 hotels in a market segment that historically lacks good benchmarking. This data is the fuel for RevMate, our AI revenue management platform, allowing us to fine-tune algorithms specifically for the nuances of the APAC hospitality industry.”
In May 2023, ZUZU announced an oversubscribed US$9 million Series B funding round led by SoftBank Ventures Asia, with participation from Atinum Partners and existing investors Wooshin Venture Investment, Visor Ventures and JG Digital Equity Ventures.