Just like London buses, you wait for a European vacation rental search engine to raise funding and three come along at once. Following Holidu and HomeToGo, the latest to secure investment is Hundredrooms, which has closed €4.1 million in Series A funding.
Spanish VC Seaya Ventures led the round, with participation from existing backers Inveready, Bankinter, and Media Digital Ventures. It brings total funding for the late 2015-founded startup to just over €5 million.
Hundredrooms claims to be the leading vacation rental search engine in Spain. Like its competitors, the company lets you search and compare prices for vacation rentals listed on sites such as Airbnb, House Trip, WaytoStay, Booking.com, GowithOh, 9flats.com and BeMate, amongst others.
It currently indexes around 5 million properties and says it’s on track to reach 6 million by the end of year, from which you can drill down by location, and various property features. You’re also able to receive recommendations and alerts via the Hundredrooms app.
“We add transparency in the vacation rental category by being able to identify properties that overlap and have different prices so customers can pick the cheapest,” Hundredrooms CEO and founder Jose Luis Martinez tells me. “We make sure customers have access to all vacation rental inventory in one single search and at the lowest possible price”.
Related to this, the startup is talking up the tech underpinning its metasearch engine. Namely, its image recognition and semantic analysis tech, which, says Martinez, enables it to identify the same property listed on two or more sites, ensuring you are given the best price.