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Indian hospitality company Oyo has taken its latest step in its European expansion, acquiring Copenhagen-based Danamica for a reported $10m.
In August, Oyo announced plans to invest €300m in expansion, with particular focus on the European market.
The Indian hospitality company has taken its latest step towards that goal this week, announcing plans to acquire Copenhagen-based pricing optimisation start-up Danamica.
While the companies kept the financial terms of the deal under wraps, a source told TechCrunch that Oyo paid around $10m to acquire the Danish firm.
Oyo said that the acquisition will be used to further drive top-line growth by leveraging dynamic pricing across the company’s various brands, in a manner similar to airlines and ride-sharing companies.
In a blogpost, global head of Oyo Vacation and Urban Homes and CSO of Oyo Hotels and Homes, Maninder Gulati, said: “We are delighted to announce our acquisition of Danamica, a Europe-based, machine learning and business intelligence company specialised in dynamic pricing, that will help us to be more accurate with pricing.”
“Data sciences across pricing, AI and imaging sciences have been a cornerstone of Oyo’s proprietary revenue enhancement technology. It is also a huge missing piece in the way traditional vacation rentals industry is run. We are glad to have found Danamica, which has built expertise in these areas.
“Both Rune [Larsen] and Mads [Westberg] (co-founders of Danamica) are extremely talented individuals and together with their team, they have built a valuable IP that analyses many years of data and pricing trends and provides logical and scientific recommendations, which will help us scale our vacation and urban homes business across Europe and other parts of the world.”
Oyo was founded in 2013 by Ritesh Agarwal. According to the company, Agarwal was “the first resident Asian to be accepted to the Thiel Fellowship”, which was started by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
The company was valued at $10bn in July 2019, after Agarwal bought $2bn in shares. That month, the company also launched a co-working platform, Oyo Workspaces. As well as offering hotel accommodation, Oyo also runs a short-term home rental marketplace similar to Airbnb, called Oyo Home.
