Gobi Bets on Middle East Player Holidayme to Unlock Asia’s Muslim Travel Market
Skift Take
Online travel agency Holidayme has raised $16 million in funding to expand outside its Middle East turf into Asia, and has bought the tiny Malaysian online booking platform for Muslim-friendly hotels, Tripfez, which will cease to exist and be converted to Holidayme.
The Series C funding round, led by Kuala Lumpur-based venture capital firm Gobi Partners and announced late last week, brings Holidayme’s total raise since inception in 2014 to just under $39 million.
Gobi is on the prowl in what it terms the "TaqwaTech" space that includes players that provide products and services for Muslims. Just before this, in mid-November, it led a Series A funding round of $1.5 million in online travel agency Sastaticket in Pakistan, which has the second largest number of Muslims in the world after Indonesia.
But its first muslim-focused investment was Tripfez, with a sum of $750,000, in 2016.
Tripfez came into the market in 2013, a year ahead of Holidayme. Its home base, Malaysia, has a population of 33 million, over 60 percent of whom are Muslims, while neighboring Indonesia has 265 million people, 87 percent of whom are Muslims, according to the 2010 census.
By comparison, Holidayme’s catchment area, the United Arab Emirates, comprises just 9.5 million people, with Islam as the official religion. The biggest populations are in Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, capital city of the federation.
Holidayme has grown to a staff of 280; Tripfez just 25. Having positioned itself in the UAE as a leading online travel platform, Holidayme has started to venture into Saudi Arabia. “Given this funding, we’ll be making a bigger thrust into Saudi and Malaysia, b
