US: Short-term rental marketplace CuddlyNest has announced that it has raised $3.5 million in funding to drive the expansion of its strategic growth initiatives and product features, and scale its engineering and product teams.
The startup previously raised $6 million during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic last October. To date, it has raised over $14 million in funds in private investment.
Ritesh Raj, COO and co-founder of CuddlyNest, said: “I’m thrilled with this milestone. The support of investors has been a significant show of commitment to our vision and paves a new way for us to do better — and go bigger — with our business model.
“As travel habits shift, there is an increased need for search options curated for their emerging needs and newfound pain points. Our core focus is to design the ultimate and most intuitive search results page, and to ensure inventory always matches search intent, and with a wide variety at that,” he added.
CuddlyNest said that its immediate priority was to serve “the drastically-increase demand for more accommodations with flexible cancellation”.
Looking ahead, CuddlyNest plans to launch features that will fulfil the rising consumer demand for sustainable and purposeful travel, highlighting energy-saving and eco-friendly amenities that are being actively implemented by properties. The startup will also debut its Care Program to empower eligible property owners to maximise profit margins and see their commission fee waived for 18 months.
Claiming to offer “the lowest aggregate commission fee” on the global online travel agency [OTA] market, CuddlyNest says that it is setting out to “revolutionise” the booking system by cutting “unnecessary” travel fees with its fee-sharing model.
CuddlyNest added that it is expecting to raise a larger round of funding in 2022.
