FabHotels gets Rs 54 crore from Goldman Sachs, Accel and Qualcomm

The fresh funding would help the budget hotel chain tap the booming hospitality market in the country and also compete with OYO

Budget hotel chain FabHotels has raised Rs 54 crore from existing investors Goldman Sachs, Accel Partners and Qualcomm in a funding round on a private placement basis. 

FabHotels has issued a total of 2,23,462 cumulative convertible preference shares to these investors, according to the regulatory documents filed by FabHotels, which were sourced from business signals platform paper.vc.

FabHotels has raised a total of $35.3 million in funding over 4 rounds, according to Crunchbase. The fresh funding is expected to help the firm compete with SoftBank-backed hotel chain OYO which is rapidly capturing the India market.

FabHotels was founded by Vaibhav Aggarwal, an alumnus of Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania,  in July 2014 starting with just four properties. He was joined by his other co-founder Adarsh Manpuria, an old colleague from Bain & Company.

The way FabHotels works is that it gets involved with the operations of properties it manages, deploying its own staff including the property manager. It also trains them periodically and does regular audits to make sure that the right experience is delivered to the consumer. The company had earlier said that it has over 10,000 rooms in its kitty spread across 40 cities with an occupancy rate of 75-80 per cent. 

The Indian hotel market is projected to grow to around $13 billion by 2020 from $7 billion in 2015, according to data platform Statista.

Aggarwal is also betting big on technology to provide the right experience to the consumers, with the help of an in-house research and development team. This includes a front-end app that helps the guest discover the inventories across hundreds of properties.The company has  deployed sensors across properties to detect electrical failures in real-time or if a room has a defunct air conditioner. The firm also deploys an in-house pricing system which analyses data points every day to optimise price point for every room. This is done based on factors such as location, check-in date and seasonality of the property.