DerbySoft Inc., the worldwide leader in hotel distribution connectivity and caching technology services, today announced that it received $9 million in Series D funding from technology-focused venture capital firm DCM through the new DCM Ventures China Fund.
DCM, a global venture capital firm investing in early stage technology companies in the U.S., China, and Japan, was founded in 1996 and operates offices in Silicon Valley, Beijing and Tokyo with more than $2.5 billion assets under management. It has currently invested in more than 40 companies in China, including Vipshop.com, 58.com, renren.com, Yiche.com, Dangdang.com, 51job.com, and Yongche, an Uber-style Chinese car rental service.
"We invested in DerbySoft because they are the recognized leader in connecting the world's largest hotel companies to the world's largest online travel sites," said Hurst Lin, co-founding partner of DCM China. "The vast collections of ‘Big Data’ associated with processing millions of hotel transactions daily provides an opportunity for DerbySoft to further their growth by providing new data-related services.”
Founded in 2002 by DerbySoft's CEO Ted Zhang and CTO Feng Ou, the company's headquarters are in Shanghai, with offices in Dallas, Texas, and London, Beijing and Tokyo.
DerbySoft's customers include the largest hotel companies in the world, such as IHG, Hilton, Carlson- Rezidor, Hyatt, Shangri-La, and Marriott, and as well as smaller regional chains including Home Inns, JinJiang Inns, Greentree Inns, and more than 1,000 independent hotels in China.
DerbySoft connects its hotel customers' central reservations systems (CRS) and third-party CRSs such as Trust International, and Sabre Hospitality Solutions / SynXis, to online booking and metasearch sites around the world, such as Booking.com, Google, Kayak, Travelocity, Room key, Tripadvisor, Ctrip, Elong, Trivago, Qunar, Kuxun, Taobao, Weibo, Tourico, H.I.S, Wotif, HotelBeds, and many more.
Beyond its reservations system connectivity services, DerbySoft's innovative and sophisticated CRS caching services have recently come into higher demand due to the continued growth of metasearch sites, which can overwhelm a hotel CRS with room rate and availability requests.
DerbySoft was among the first to develop a system for hotel room providers -- which can include online travel agencies, tour operators, etc. -- to manage and optimize their real-time bidding, placement and ad spending on metasearch sites such as Google. DerbySoft officially launched its MetaSearch Manager last year.
"The demand for our MetaSearch Manager platform and related services has been almost overwhelming since we launched it publicly late last year," said DerbySoft Co-Founder and CEO Ted Zhang. "We intend to use the DCM funds to ramp up our team and operations to accommodate the exciting demand for this new product, and to continue to increase the quality of our existing services.
"This additional capital will also enable us to pursue other new opportunities that leverage our existing technology connections and infrastructure, such as potentially providing marketing services based on real-time aggregated hotel booking data," Zhang continued. "We are honored that such a top-notch, well-known VC has granted us this vote of confidence."
