Co-living startup Zolostays has secured second funding of this year, after raising $7 Mn from Trifecta Capital in a series C round. The startup had earlier raised $30 Mn from plethora of investors like Nexus Venture and Mirae Asset.
The $7 Mn fundraising comes amid reports that Zolostays was in advanced talks to raise massive funding of $100 Mn. Co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sikri had also confirmed about this in an exclusive interview with Techpluto in September. Therefore it may very well be the case that the latest funding may be part of the larger funding round that the company plans to raise in forthcoming weeks. However, the company hasn’t dropped any strong hint on this front.
Commenting about the latest funding, Sikri said “We will utilize these funds to further our investments in capital expenditure, product innovation and expand to newer cities in the new year aggressively.”
Zolostays claims to be India’s largest co-living startup, managing nearly 400 cities and 10,000 beds across top metropolitan cities. Although the company refused to shed light on its revenue and other key statistics, it claimed that the firm will achieve profitability in next one and half year. The company is equally confident about achieving GMV annual run rate of more than 50 Mn by the year end.
But it won’t all that easy to achieve these ambitious targets, considering that competition in co-living space is steadily intensifying. Especially with the entry of SoftBank backed Oyo Rooms, the space is witnessing high level competition. Other competitors in this market include StanzaLiving and Nestaway.
India’s co-living startups are trying to cash on the migrating millennials, who migrate to metropolitan cities for better job opportunities & education purposes and therefore are always on a lookout for high quality accommodations – accommodations that are better than the normal PG accommodation.