Hospitality firm Stay Vista Pvt. Ltd on Tuesday said it has raised ₹40 crore in a Series B funding round led by existing investor DSG Consumer Partners, with participation from Capri Global and CA Holdings.
The company has nearly 500 villas and homes on its platform in close to 50 locations in the country. The fund raise is likely to accelerate growth, co-founder Amit Damani said.
“We want to scale from a revenue of ₹120 crore per annum to over ₹1,000 crore in the next 3-4 years. For this, the company would like to have about 2,500 homes in the portfolio,” said Damani. The company, founded in 2015, is adding food and beverage and spa services to increase revenue.
Most of the company’s rentals are in two Lonavala and Goa, where it has signed up 100 and 50 villas respectively. It also has a large number of homes in Kasauli, said Damani.
In March, the company rebranded itself from ‘Vista Rooms’ to ‘StayVista’ to focus primarily on being a hospitality partner for villa owners, and not just be a platform where customers can find home stays. Including this round, the company has now raised a total of ₹58 crore since its inception in 2015. In 2021, it had raised ₹10 crore ($1.32 million) in funding led by DSG Consumer Partners, with participation from CA Holdings, Artha India Ventures and Everest Flavours’ founder Anand Ladsariya. Companies like Singapore Angels Network and individuals like Rajan Anandan of Sequoia Capital had also invested in the firm’s angel round.
Hari Premkumar, India head of DSG Consumer Partners said StayVista has demonstrated resilience in navigating the pandemic while driving revenue growth in a capital-efficient manner.
“Vacation rentals are one of the fastest growing segments in hospitality, where multiple brands have scaled massively across geographies. In India as well, we expect the segment to expand further and it is well poised to make the most of this opportunity and build a category-defining brand in villa rentals,” he said.
StayVista’s competitors in this space include SaffronStays, MakeMyTrip and Airbnb in this space.
Damani said the company has doubled its revenue during the pandemic due to high repeat and referrals and it has over 300,000 guests who have stayed with it since its inception. The company was cofounded by Damani, Pranav Maheshwari and Ankita Sheth.
Much like other hotel companies, StayVista’s business model is also an asset-light one where it gives about 70% of the operating revenue to the owner and takes a fee of 30% to supervise the property, market it and maintain its brand cost. Separately, homeowners bear all the operating expenses of the location.
The firm has separated its business into ‘getaways’ and ‘holiday market’ categories on the basis of how far they are from a city. Getaways are usually locations within 2-3 hours of cities and the others are further away and tend to have a slightly longer duration of stays.
Research conducted by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) has said that the travel and tourism sector’s contribution to the Indian economy could surpass pre-pandemic levels in 2022, with a year-on-year growth of 20.7%. The forecast from the WTTC’s Economic Impact Report (EIR) said the sector’s contribution to the nation’s economy could reach almost ₹15.9 trillion ($215 billion) in 2022, 1% above 2019 levels.
