HomeToGo, the European ‘metasearch’ engine for holiday rentals, has raised €6 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is DN capital, and Acton Capital Partners, adding to the €2 million previously raised from various angel investors.
The Berlin-based startup says the new capital will be used for “rapid international expansion”, including a planned U.S. launch sometime “soon”.
In the last couple of weeks, HomeToGo has expanded to the U.K. and Spain, joining existing dedicated sites for Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and Austria.
It’s also been running a fairly prominent TV ad campaign in Germany, which, armed with fresh VC funding, I wouldn’t be surprised to see continue (and possibly further afield) in a bid to continue scaling at speed. The company has a head count of 50, and 30 of those are technology-based, and I’m told is hiring “at all levels”.
To that end, HomeToGo claims to be the largest metasearch engine for holiday rentals (though U.S. competitor Tripping may disagree). It aggregates over 150 rental websites — including Homeaway, Booking.com, Wimdu, 9flats, Casamundo, among others — and lists more than 2.7 million offers.
The search engine allows you to filter holiday rentals by location, dates, budget, and various amenities of a holiday property (eg. by distance to water or pet-friendly rentals), and generates (affiliate) revenue for the traffic it sends to the booking sites it aggregates.
Perhaps more interesting is the team’s pedigree and previous track record, no doubt a reason behind DN capital and Acton Capital Partners’ backing. HomeToGo CEO and co-founder Patrick Andrä previously led business development at the Rocket Internet online furniture retailer Home24.
And the startup’s two other co-founders are Wolfgang Heigl, who previously founded the German flight comparison website Swoodoo, which was acquired by Kayak (now part of the Priceline Group), and Nils Regge, who founded the holiday rental portal Casamundo, which he later sold to the Dutch @Leisure group (in which Axel Springer is now majority stakeholder).
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