Digital payments and e-commerce firm Paytm has bought NightStay Travels, a Delhi-based company that operates a marketplace for last-minute hotel bookings.
NightStay was acquired for around $20 million (around Rs 130 crore) in a cash-and-equity deal, The Times of India reported, without mentioning the source of the information. The report also said that the entire team of NightStay will join Paytm.
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NightStay was founded by Nasr Khan and Deepak Negi in March 2015. The company buys unsold inventory from hotel owners at a discount and offers the rooms under three categories – boutique, business and luxury class. It does not offer concessions on the discounted price.
An IIM-Calcutta alumnus, Khan was earlier the vice-president of the products vertical at Sanjeev Bhikchandani-led Info Edge. Negi, is an alumnus of the Symbiosis Center for Management Studies.
The NightStay app is available on both Android and iOS platforms. It operates across Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Goa, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Kochi, Pune, Agra and Chandigarh.
In August 2015, NightStay raised $500,000 in a seed round from Vivek Bihani of Bedrock Venture Management, GSF founder Rajesh Sawhney and Shailesh Vikram Singh, who was then executive director at SeedFund.
Paytm has been on an acquisition spree across different verticals to diversify its offerings. Last month, Paytm parent One97 Communications bought Cube26 Software. In May, Paytm bought Chennai-based Orbgen Technologies, which has an online ticketing platform.
Paytm, founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma, started off as a mobile recharge platform. But it has diversified to become a digital payments and e-commerce company. It has also started a payments bank.
It is funded by Japan’s SoftBank Group, China’s Alibaba and multi-stage investment firm SAIF Partners.
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