Yanonlja pumps more capital into Rocket Internet's Zen Rooms

Zen Rooms by Rocket Internet is a budget short-term rental accommodation company in Southeast Asia that recently announced it has secured funding from South Korean hotel hooking platform, Yanolja, as well as locked acquisitions of early investors' stakes, and made a strategic alliance

The deal comes a year after Yanolja invested US$15 million in Zen Rooms, with the right to fully acquire the latter in the future.

Through the latest transaction, Zen Rooms early investor Asia Internet Holdings, a joint venture by Rocket Internet and Ooredoo Telecom, has agreed to exit its stake to Yanolja. RedBadge Pacific and SBI Korea will remain as investors, while Access Ventures will join as co-investor.

“Since first investing in Zen, we have shared the same vision of operational excellence and customer-centricity to radically improve the Southeast Asian hospitality market. In the last 12 months, the Zen team has taken major steps to fulfill this vision and has grown exponentially while displaying top inventory quality."

— Jongyoon Kim, CEO of Online Business at Yanolja.

Zen Rooms’ budget hotel franchise business will also be combined with Yanolja’s scale and hospitality technologies, according to a statement. Along with this, it will be able to tap into a Yanolja investor, Booking Holdings, for support in hotel tech and sales distributions as well.

In June, Yanolja secured US$180 million from Booking Holdings and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC at more than US$1 billion valuation.

Yanolja and Zen Rooms are also set to work on deploying automation technology to enhance customer experience and reduce budget hotels’ operating costs.

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