DJUBO was established in June 2014 by Tarun Gulati and Sankalp Goel, who between them have over 30 years of hospitality, private equity and software development experience, to leverage the disruption being caused in the travel and accommodation market by Online Travel Agents (“OTAs”) and hotel aggregators.
Hotel online revenues in India are expected to grow by 70% in the next 2 years. Key driver for this growth are OTAs and hotel aggregators that have raised over $600 million of funding over the last few months. However, only 20% of the hotel inventory is visible online while more than 91,000 hotels will miss out on the online opportunity because they use minimal or no technology. The average budget hotel accommodation provider (let’s call him “Mr. Joshi”)
recognizes the benefits of shifting from manual revenue and reservation systems to real-time automation but has been unable to find a systems that (a) does not compromise on existing offline revenue sources, (b) solves the entire sales management problem rather than provide piecemeal solutions, (c) take up inordinate amount of his time and bandwidth, and (d) is cost effective.
The founders recognised the tremendous market opportunity offered by a solution that could address the needs of Mr. Joshi and hence DJUBO was developed as a Seamless, Agnostic, Comprehensive and Revenue focused application with a thin layer of operations handling. DJUBO provides, for Mr. Joshi, a single point that automatically provides front office automation, voucher management, payment follow-up, online channel manager & updation, direct booking engine and room booking chart.
DJUBO was seed funded in September 2015 with $1 million by Naspers Group (via MIH India Ecommerce, their investment vehicle) for a minority stake post which the product was formally and aggressively launched in the market. DJUBO has received a phenomenal response and acceptability in the market. DJUBO is implemented on the cloud as a service and therefore is rapidly scalable across the world. In approximately 10 months since launch, DJUBO has already been adopted by over 1100 hotels and is currently adding over 150 hotels a month. Notably, even within this short period, early adopters have a reported increase in OTA revenues of between 20-100% and DJUBO already has a 1.7% share in the revenues for bookings made via OTAs.
The Company’s core business operations are approaching breakeven as DJUBO's core layers of Centralized Reservation System (“CRS”) cum Channel Manager ("CM") cum Booking Engine & Templatised Website ("BE cum Website") are offered to customers for a subscription fee cum commission that is substantially more than ongoing maintenance costs for the product. Further, DJUBO's scalable architecture allows it to implement several add-on applications that provide additional value to Mr. Joshi and will result in incremental profitability, many of which have already been integrated into the offering. Key add-ons, that can provide significant revenue opportunities, that the Company is currently working on are Property Management Systems, Big Data analytics and Competitive Intelligence.
What makes DJUBO different? The market is saturated with standalone products for channel management, website booking engine, sales management, etc. At best they offer maybe two connected products, or integration with other products or reduced functionality.
DJUBO has been developed keeping in mind the pain points and loss in efficiency that created due to use of these separate systems. DJUBO is a completely integrated sales management system, which in essence means that hoteliers have a single system to manage all their sales channels as opposed to having one system to manage all the OTAs, another to manage website bookings, another to manage offline enquiries and a fourth one, if at all a hotelier decides to go for it, to cumulate all this data into one place by way of a CRS. Functionality in the latter case also becomes limited as the systems are being developed by separate entities with different product development paths.
So through this integrated approach, the hoteliers save on costs and are able to distribute their inventory more efficiently.
About Founders
Profile - Tarun Gulati, Co-founder, DJUBO Tarun did his MBA from IIM Banglore (2005). Tarun spent 1.5 years at ICICI Venture and 5 years with the NY based D.E.Shaw & Co’s Indian Private Equity team and has been involved with deals ranging from $400 million to $18 million during his Private Equity career. He was among the youngest Global Vice Presidents ever at D.E. Shaw & Co at the age of 27 when he quit in 2011 to get his hands dirty on his own. He comes with a lot of new age hotel management experience being fully involved in hotel operations for the first 4 years of his entrepreneurial journey. Having adopted and used cutting products available globally for his own family hotel business, Tarun is very well versed with the entire Hotel Tech landscape globally and has been the first adopter of many global tech products among all Indian hotels.
Profile - Sankalp Goel, Co-founder, DJUBO Sankalp comes with a rich and unique blend of Hospitality and Technology backgrounds. Having witnessed his Hotels family business with close quarters for over 2 decades, Sankalp completed is PDGCA from IMT Ghaziabad in 2007 and was a Gold Medalist of his batch. Having started his career as a Software Developer at Grapecity India Pvt. Ltd. - a leading Japanese IT Services Provider, Sankalp kick-started his own Software Services Business in 2010 and helped established it as a formidable IT Service Provider specializing in Product Development. After spear heading deliveries of numerous highly scalable, cloud and mobile applications, for clients across the globe, Sankalp moved to a full time role at Djubo in May, 2014.
