Grab said to invest US$100m into OYO Hotels

Grab has invested over US$100 million into OYO Hotels, an Indian hospitality service and budget hotel network in the latest series E financing round. According to the Economic Times, which cited a regulatory filing, the Grab-controlled A1 Holdings Inc was issued 2,884 Cumulative Convertible Preference Shares at a price of US$34,670 per share.Grab's spokesperson confirmed the investment to A+M. A+M has reached out to OYO for comment on how the funds will be used for marketing. This comes after the budget hotel network raised RM3.3 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank Investment Advisers through SoftBank Vision Fund. The company also received a commitment of additional RM827 million, bringing the total to RM4.14 billion.In July this year, OYO was also said to receive an investment of between US$300 to US$500 million from Chinese internet company Tencent, apparently raising the budget hotel network's value to over US$2 billion.Abhinav Sinha, chief operating officer, OYO Hotels told A+M previously that it has committed an initial capital of US$20 million for its expansion into Malaysia. The company plans to grow its Malaysian team from 50 employees to 500 over the next 12 months, and aims to create more than 5,000 new jobs in Malaysia over the next few years.OYO Hotels is looking to expand into Sarawak, adding on to the list of 50 hotels it has across major cities in Malaysia, including Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Langkawi, Johor and Melaka. Sinha said that Malaysia was chosen as the “first port-of-call” in Southeast Asia given its attractive characteristics such as higher-than-average mobile penetration and a large internet population. Also, budget hotels’ market share of the hospitality sector in Malaysia is growing rapidly, worth US$2 to US$3 billion as of last year.