Travelmob Aims to be Asia’s Airbnb, Snags $1 Million in Seed Funding

Earlier this year, the former managing director of Skype Asia, Turochas “T” Fuad, left to form a new startup called Travelmob. And today, Travelmob has revealed that it has raised US$1 million in seed funding, led by Jungle Ventures and with participation from other “prominent, private investors.” The money will be used to “help drive further growth and expansion for Travelmob across the Asia Pacific region.”

[UPDATE on November 28th: Travelmob has revealed today that the other participating investor is Silicon Valley VC firm Accel Partners].

When we looked at the online travel service and chatted to Turochas in March, Travelmob.com was still in stealthy beta mode, and it eventually launched in July. The Singapore-based site is different to most others in the travel sector in that it focuses on short-term rentals – not hotel bookings. In many ways it’s like Airbnb for Asia, but Travelmob focuses on consumers traveling in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, promising a much more authentic and social travel experience than you’ll usually get at hotels.

Though nearly all its rentals are in this continent, a Travelmob representative tells us that its user-base is much more mixed:

50 percent of [the site’s] visitors are currently coming from within the Asia Pacific region and the remaining 50 percent from markets like the US, Europe, and the Middle East. However, we are increasingly getting more intra-APAC travelers.

For all those folks, the site runs in English, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Plus, it supports 13 currencies – 10 of which are Asian ones.

The startup has added some new features recently, such as “experience tags” to allow potential travelers to search by the kind of trip they want – one more oriented to “nature” or the “beach” or “nightlife” for example.