Short-term accommodation marketplaces Wimdu and 9Flats.com, the latter backed by telecommunications group Deutsche Telekom, have agreed a merger, WiWo reported yesterday.
Wimdu was founded in 2011 and received $90m in funding from e-commerce holding group Rocket Internet and investment firm Kinnevik the same year. It has more than 1 million registered users and oversees a network of 300,000 properties across 100 countries.
Founded, like Wimdu, in Germany in 2011, 9Flats operates a marketplace made up of some 200,000 properties spanning 140 countries across six continents.
T-Venture, the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary since superseded by Deutsche Telekom Strategic Investments, led a round of undisclosed size for 9Flats in 2012 that included Redpoint Ventures and eVenture Capital Partners, the two firms that had previously provided it with $10m.
The combined company’s 500,000-strong property network will be around 25% the size of market leader Airbnb’s, and it will have a turnover of about €100m ($110m). It will be headed by 9Flats CEO Roman Bach and based in Singapore, where 9Flats relocated to avoid German regulations.
Both brands will continue under their separate names but the deal was reportedly a ‘fire sale’ on Wimdu’s part, according to German media reports backed up by TechCrunch, which cited undisclosed sources.