Over 400 Startup CEOs Write Letter To Govt in Support of Stayzilla Founder

Showing solidarity with their peer, the Indian Startup industry has whole-heartedly come out in the support of Stayzilla founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Yogendra Vasupal (Yogi), who is currently locked up in a Chennai jail for not paying up dues to the tune of INR 17.2 million (approx US$259,000) that the startup reportedly owed to Chennai based advertising agency, Jigsaw Advertising.

Raising their voice against the unfair and illegal treatment being vetted out to Vasupal, Founders of over 400 Indian startups have written an open letter to country's Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh requesting a fair investigation into the whole Stayzilla issue and getting Vasupal released as soon as possible.

The open letter is being folated on a website, Help Yogi, which has been especially created by the startup industry in support of the Stayzilla founder. The letter that urges that Union Home Minister “to look into this matter and ensure that expeditious justice is provided to Yogi," has over 400 signatures till the time of filing this story. Some of the prominent names amongst the signatories include Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma; OlaCabs Co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal; Infosys' Mohandas Pai, Practo's Shashank ND; and NestAway's Amarendra Sahu and Jitendra Jagdev.

The letter, which is addressed to the Union Home Minister has also been marked to Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of State for Commerce and Industry; Amitabh Kant, CEO, Niti Aayog; Edappadi K. Palaniswami, Chief Minister, Tamil Nadu; Rajiv Mehrishi, Home Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs; and Ramesh Abhishek, Secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion.

Vasupal was arrested last week following complaints from vendors about non-payment of dues. It is important to note here, that Stayzilla, which claimed to be the largest platform (website and app) for verified homestays and alternate stays in India, had decided to shutdown its shop abruptly last month (Read Here). A blog post written by Vasupal, just a few hours prior to his arrest, said that some scary dolls were delivered to the home of Stayzilla CEO Sachit Singhvi on March 9 bearing the image of his son. In a video posted by the Stayzilla CEO, a man can been seen assaulting a company employee. In the blog post, he had also alleged that he was being hounded by his landlords and Jigsaw Advertising.

According to the open letter, Yogi is being forced to confess a crime he has never committed.

The letter concludes by stating, “We are standing up together as a community and believers in the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for “Startup India. Stand-up India” to call for a free and fair investigation into the dispute and strongly oppose any abuse of power to subvert the law of land. We humbly request you to look into this matter and ensure that expeditious justice is provided to Yogi [Yogendra Vasupal].”

You can join the #HelpYogi campaign, by signing here.

Over 400 Startup CEOs Write Letter To Govt in Support of Stayzilla Founder

Showing solidarity with their peer, the Indian Startup industry has whole-heartedly come out in the support of Stayzilla founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Yogendra Vasupal (Yogi), who is currently locked up in a Chennai jail for not paying up dues to the tune of INR 17.2 million (approx US$259,000) that the startup reportedly owed to Chennai based advertising agency, Jigsaw Advertising.

Raising their voice against the unfair and illegal treatment being vetted out to Vasupal, Founders of over 400 Indian startups have written an open letter to country's Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh requesting a fair investigation into the whole Stayzilla issue and getting Vasupal released as soon as possible.

The open letter is being folated on a website, Help Yogi, which has been especially created by the startup industry in support of the Stayzilla founder. The letter that urges that Union Home Minister “to look into this matter and ensure that expeditious justice is provided to Yogi," has over 400 signatures till the time of filing this story. Some of the prominent names amongst the signatories include Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma; OlaCabs Co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal; Infosys' Mohandas Pai, Practo's Shashank ND; and NestAway's Amarendra Sahu and Jitendra Jagdev.

The letter, which is addressed to the Union Home Minister has also been marked to Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of State for Commerce and Industry; Amitabh Kant, CEO, Niti Aayog; Edappadi K. Palaniswami, Chief Minister, Tamil Nadu; Rajiv Mehrishi, Home Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs; and Ramesh Abhishek, Secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion.

Vasupal was arrested last week following complaints from vendors about non-payment of dues. It is important to note here, that Stayzilla, which claimed to be the largest platform (website and app) for verified homestays and alternate stays in India, had decided to shutdown its shop abruptly last month (Read Here). A blog post written by Vasupal, just a few hours prior to his arrest, said that some scary dolls were delivered to the home of Stayzilla CEO Sachit Singhvi on March 9 bearing the image of his son. In a video posted by the Stayzilla CEO, a man can been seen assaulting a company employee. In the blog post, he had also alleged that he was being hounded by his landlords and Jigsaw Advertising.

According to the open letter, Yogi is being forced to confess a crime he has never committed.

The letter concludes by stating, “We are standing up together as a community and believers in the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for “Startup India. Stand-up India” to call for a free and fair investigation into the dispute and strongly oppose any abuse of power to subvert the law of land. We humbly request you to look into this matter and ensure that expeditious justice is provided to Yogi [Yogendra Vasupal].”

You can join the #HelpYogi campaign, by signing here.

India's Largest Startup For 'Stays' Shuts Down

In one of the most shocking developments of 2017 for the Indian startup industry, Stayzilla, which claimed to be the largest platform (website and app) for verified homestays and alternate stays in India, has decided to shut down its shop abruptly.

While Stayzilla's decision to shutdown suddenly might seem abrupt, but it isn't totally abrupt when seriously pondered upon. A recently published report by Xeler8 revealed that in India nearly one in two startups ends up saying bye-bye sooner than later.

Founded in the year 2010, by Yogendra Vasupal with his wife Rupal Yogendra and his friend Sachit Singhi, Stayzilla was born out of their passion for traveling. The website, which once boosted of having 55,000 stay options in close to 1,000 towns across the country, now shows "sold out” properties tag for any date in March and beyond. While you can very much make bookings for the month of February, but beyond that the website is just blurting out "sold out” with n number of criteria applied.

Since nowadays social media is a startup's communication mode with its customers, we decided to vet Stayzilla's Facebook and Twitter accounts to find out if there's something wrong with the website; what we discovered only added to our suspicion. While Stayzilla’s Facebook page, which normally had daily postings, doesn't show any new posts from February 16 onwards, its Twitter account, on the other hand has now been made private with the last tweet being sent out on February 14.

Stayzilla CEO and co-founder Yogendra Vasupal decided to put all the rumours going around in the industry to rest by writing a blogpost. He said, "I would like to announce today that we would be bringing to a halt the operations of Stayzilla in its current form, and looking to reboot it with a different business model. This has been one of the toughest decisions that I have taken so far but it is the right thing to do."

So, what went wrong?

It is not that Stayzilla is the only homestay and alternate stays startup that wasn't having a good time in the longest time, the budget accommodation sector on the whole hasn't been performing well for quite sometime now, for example, Oyo, which is the highest funded of them, had financial losses running to the tune of US$52.5 million while it made a revenue of just US$2 million in financial year 2015-16. While in comparison to Oyo, Inasra Technologies, the parent company of Stayzilla, took a hit of just US$14 million in the same period with a revenue of US$2 million.

It is important to note that while Oyo with US$188 million in funding, has more cash in the bank to burn through; Stayzilla's funding on the other hand, comes out at less than a fifth of Oyo’s.

Starting its journey in 2010, Stayzilla had initially been successful in landing a whopping US$500,000 in funding from the Indian Angel Network. This was followed by a series A round of an undisclosed amount in the year 2013. In 2015, the startup raised a whopping amount of US$20 million and US$13 million in series B and C rounds from Matrix Partners and Nexus Ventures.

The startup had been looking for fresh funding for quite some months, but the overall funding squeeze prevalent in the startup industry from last year is continuing its run this year as well. With the fundings drying up, a number of startups are being forced to shutdown. Last year, we listed 20 Indian Startups That Died Young in 2016. And with Stayzilla's surprise shutdown, I think we have found ourselves the first big startup for the 2017 edition of the list.

The entry of cash-rich and popular global unicorn Airbnb in the Indian subcontinent only made matters worse for the homegrown Stayzilla. The startup, which became profitable last year, took a large piece of the pie in the budget accommodation market, leaving very less for others. Though Stayzilla had held its position in the alternative accommodation space, but without more funding, it wasn't just feasible for the startup to sustain such a large network spread across the country.

Stayzilla Signs MOU with Gujarat Tourism to Encourage Homestays in the State

Stayzilla.com, the aggregator for verified homestays in India and Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited (TCGL) signed an MOU to jointly promote and market homestays and alternate stays in the state of Gujarat. The MOU was signed and exchanged by Mr. S.J.Haider (IAS), Principal Secretary (Tourism) of Gujarat Tourism in the presence of Hon. Union Minister of State for Tourism and Culture, Dr. Mahesh Sharma and Hon. Tourism Secretary, Mr. Vinod Zutshi, Ministry of Tourism, Government of India.

After signing MoUs with Madhya Pradesh State Tourism Development Corporation and Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board, this tie-up firmly establishes Stayzilla as a leading player in the industry of homestays and alternate stays. Under this agreement, Stayzilla and Gujarat Tourism will share the current base of homestays on each other's digital platforms to bring more awareness on homestays in Gujarat. Stayzilla will also aid verification procedures and jointly promote the concept of homestays in the state. All homestays registered with TCGL will receive technological and operational support to run. Also, Stayzilla & TCGL will jointly conduct education and training sessions for TCGL registered homestays on best practices such as online usage, content management, operations and expense management, which will benefit the hosts of the homestays.

The company is closely working with various state tourism departments for joint promotion and marketing of homestays. Stayzilla has recently signed MoUs with Madhya Pradesh State Tourism Development Corporation and Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board to enhance homestay concept among the travelers in these states. There have been around 600 workshops conducted pan India, at various locations, with the hosts from different corners, out of which about 80 workshops were conducted in various towns and cities of Gujarat. This has helped in boosting homestay supply in Gujarat over the last 6months, thereby bringing up the number of verified homestays in the state to over 400.

Commenting on this announcement, Ankit Rastogi, Vice President, Marketplace, Stayzilla said, “We, at Stayzilla, have maintained that the key to increasing tourism is the availability of quality and affordable rooms, pan India. The shortage of rooms cannot be solved efficiently by constructing hotels within a short frame of time. We are excited about the fact that various State Governments in conjunction with the Central Government have come together in realizing this. Gujarat has emerged as one of the most popular states in the country for travel, thus playing a significant role in India’s tourism potential. This MoU, like the others, will help in building a vibrant ecosystem for Homestays in Gujarat.”

For travelers across the globe and the country, Gujarat offers a massive coastline along its southern fringes with the mighty White Rann of Kutch offering an enchanting landscape of white sand desert. Besides, Gujarat has carved for itself a position as a pilgrimage destination with its extremely popular pilgrimage circuit of Somnath, Porbandar and Dwarka in the West. Furthermore, the philosophy of Gandhi draws many globetrotters to this place, added by its richness in culture, heritage, food and flora and fauna.

Stayzilla has a wide range of homestay options in many of these towns such as the ‘French Haveli’, which is a 150 year old restored Gujarati home in Ahmedabad, ‘Divan’s Bungalow’, a boutique homestay with rich heritage in Raikhad and ‘Deewanji ni Haveli’, a 250 year old restored haveli in Ahmedabad.

Stayzilla, which has presently over 8000 homestay units in its portfolio is working at grassroot level for unlocking more and more numbers of registered homestays in the country. The company is conducting town hall activities across 4500 cities to create awareness about homestays and alternate stays.

Stayzilla Signs MOU with Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board for Promotion of Homestays in the Region

Stayzilla.com, the aggregator for verified homestays in India and Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board (UTDB) signed an MOU to jointly promote and market homestays in Uttarakhand. The MoU was signed in the presence of Hon’ble Chief Minister of Uttarakhand, Shri Harish Rawat, Mr. Shailesh Bagauli, Secretary Tourism & CEO, Uttarakhand Tourism and Mr. Ankit Rastogi, Vice-President, Marketplace, Stayzilla.com. The region’s beauty and hilly terrain lends itself as ideal place for increasing homestays since tourist demand outnumbers the stay options available. Increasing and promoting homestays in mountainous areas will help fulfill demand and support local economy.

The company is closely working with various state tourism departments for joint promotion of homestays. Stayzilla recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Madhya Pradesh State Tourism Development Corporation for joint promotion of Homestays.

Mr. Shailesh Bagauli, CEO, UTDB said, “These are interesting times for Uttarakhand tourism with growing influx of tourists from across the country and we are working towards strengthening our homestay eco-system. We believe that our partnership with largest aggregator of homestays, Stayzilla will be extremely beneficial for offering best-in-class stay experience for our tourists.

We are cognizant of Stayzilla team’s strength as they are already closely working with various state governments such as Madhya Pradesh, North East and more for joint promotion of homestays” he added.

Under this agreement, Stayzilla will support verification procedures and jointly boost homestays across Uttarakhand.  All homestays registered with UTDB will receive technological and operational support to run the homestays. Also, Stayzilla & UTDB will jointly conduct education and training sessions for UTDB registered homestays on best practices such as online usage, content management, operations and expense management.

Stayzilla has been constantly conducting sensitization workshops for promoting the concept of homestays and bed & breakfast outfits across Uttarakhand region in cities such as Dehradun, Haridwar, Almorah, Nainital, Gopeshwar, Munsiyari, Rudraprayag, Chamba, Uttarkashi, Tehri, Rampur, Rudrapur, Mussoorie, Dhanaulti and Lansdowne. The company also has over 500 verified homestays in the region.

Commenting on the signing announcement, Mr. Ankit Rastogi, Vice-President, Marketplace, Stayzilla, said “At Stayzilla we are very excited to collaborate with Uttarakhand Tourism for promoting comfortable homestays in the region. The true essence, practices, traditions and natural ecosystem of any region can only be experienced through staying in homestays.”

Stayzilla which presently has over 8000 homestay units in its portfolio is working at grassroot level for unlocking more and more numbers of registered homestays in the country. The company is conducting townhall activities across 4500 cities to create awareness about homestays and bed & breakfast outfits.

Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board is the advisory body to the Government on all matters relating to tourism in the State. The statutory board is chaired by the Tourism Minister, Govt. of Uttarakhand and Chief Secretary of Uttarakhand. 

Stayzilla.com is the largest platform (website and app) for verified homestays and alternate stays. The platform caters to both home owners and travelers looking for differentiated, unique stay experiences. It offers special selective ‘community’ feature on the app that matches hosts and guests by their preferences and shared interests.

Hotel Aggregator Stayzilla Gets $13M in Series C From Existing Investors Matrix Partners & Nexus Ventures

Online aggregator of budget hotels and homestays, StayZilla has raised over $13 million in a Series C round of funding from existing investors Matrix Partners and Nexus Ventures, according to documents filed with the Registrar of Companies. The funding round was split into three tranches of $8.8 million (Rs.58.5 crore), $1.9 million (Rs.13 crore) and $2.4 million (Rs.16.3 crore), between November 2015 and March 2016.

The raised funding will be used by the company to improve product and technology and marketing initiatives for the alternate stay business. It previously raised $20 million from Nexus Venture Partners and Matrix Partners in February 2015.

Stayzilla is a platform (website and app) for verified homestays and alternate stays. It has more than 55,000 homestay and alternate stay options across 4000 towns in India. The platform caters to both home owners and travelers looking for differentiated, unique stay experiences. It offers special selective ‘community’ feature on the app that matches hosts and guests by their preferences and shared interests. The firm was founded by Yogendra Vasupal, Sachit Singhi and Rupal Yogendra.

StayZilla competes with budget hotel accommodation service provider Oyo Rooms and online travel agencies (OTAs) including MakeMyTrip, Goibibo and Yatra as well as home rental provider Airbnb. The Indian travel market is expected to become worth $40 billion by 2020, as per Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder and chief technology officer of Airbnb.

Three days back, Stayzilla has hired Pankaj Gupta as Chief Product Officer and President of Technology. Pankaj was most recently at Twitter in San Francisco where he joined as an early employee and led the Personalization and Recommendations team. Pankaj will be shifting base from San Francisco to join Stayzilla at their Bengaluru office.

Image Source: ShutterStock

Stayzilla Ropes in Former Twitter Director Pankaj Gupta as CPO and President of Technology

Stayzilla has hired Pankaj Gupta as Chief Product Officer and President of Technology. Pankaj was most recently at Twitter in San Francisco where he joined as an early employee and led the Personalization and Recommendations team. He and his team were behind many of Twitter's successful search, discovery, and other data products and technologies across web and mobile. Pankaj tweeted the news and wrote about it on his blog today.

Yogendra Vasupal, Co-founder and CEO, Stayzilla, said, “We are delighted to have Pankaj join us at Stayzilla. Pankaj brings with him years of experience leading product and technology for a platform built around a huge community. With Stayzilla's growth in homestays and community-based hosting, we could not have found a better person or time for him to lead our Product and Technology."

Pankaj Gupta added, “I’m excited to be working with Yogi and Stayzilla wherein I can put my passion for innovation and building consumer products together. I look forward to working with a great team on this amazing opportunity.”

Before Twitter, Pankaj has founded two startups that were both acquired. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science where he won the award for the best thesis, and an undergraduate from IIT Delhi where he stood first in the Dept. of Computer Science. He has published more than 30 papers and holds more than 20 patents.

Pankaj will be shifting base from San Francisco to join Stayzilla at their Bengaluru office.

Founded in 2005 by Vasupal and Sachit Sanghi, Stayzilla raised $15 million in Series B round of funding led by venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Matrix Partners India in February 2015. The company had raised an undisclosed amount in its Series A round of funding from Matrix in October 2013 and secured $0.5 million in seed funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN) in 2012.

It is a platform (website and app) for verified homestays and alternate stays. It has more than 55,000 homestay and alternate stay options across 4000 towns in India. The platform caters to both home owners and travelers looking for differentiated, unique stay experiences. Stayzilla offers special selective ‘community’ feature on the app that matches hosts and guests by their preferences and shared interests.

Image Source: ShutterStock