Singapore-headquartered hotel management startup ZUZU Hospitality has raised $5.9 million in a Series B extension round, it announced on Thursday.
The funding came from existing investors Wavemaker Partners, Velocity Ventures and Vulpes Ventures, as well as new investor Latin Leap.
ZUZU provides a platform for revenue management and distribution for independent hotels, which make up the vast majority of the market, to compete with global chains. The firm said it has leveraged a dataset from over 3,000 hotels across Southeast Asia and India to form AI revenue management platform RevMate.
The company will use the new capital injection to accelerate product development, expand data capabilities, and scale go-to-market efforts.
“AI is reshaping how demand is predicted and revenue is optimised,” said Vikram Malhi, founder and CEO of ZUZU Hospitality. The company added that by helping independent hotels transform from manual pricing to revenue-generating machines, its existing hotel partners have seen an average 8x return on investment.
Shiv Choudhury, founding partner of Wavemaker Growth—the growth fund of Wavemaker Partners, said: “Southeast Asia’s hotel market is growing fast and is highly fragmented, with a large chunk of it being independent hotels. These hotels don’t have the technology and expertise that big hotel chains have in revenue and property management.”
He highlighted that technologies that are being developed by ZUZU enable “a very high satisfaction and stickiness with hotels, and growth of 30-40% in occupancy rates”.
ZUZU cited McKinsey estimation that AI could generate over $400 billion in annual value across travel and hospitality, primarily through intelligent pricing, hyper-personalisation, and operational efficiency.
Prior to this Series B extension, ZUZU had raised a total of $28 million from investors including JG Digital Equity Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, Goodman Capital, Line Ventures, AC Ventures, and others.
The company is still loss-making, but its revenue has grown from $1.28 million in 2021 to $7.18 million 2023, per data from DealStreetAsia’s DATA VANTAGE.
