Online Hotel Distribution Solution Developer DerbySoft Raises $9 million from DCM

DerbySoft Inc., a hotel distribution connectivity and caching technology service provider, has raised $9 million in Series D funding from DCM Ventures China Fund.

DerbySoft connects central reservations systems (CRS) of hotels and third-parties to online booking and search services, such as Booking.com, Google, Kayak, Travelocity and Tripadvisor. Since it’s headquartered in Shanghai, China, the company also works with Chinese online travel agencies (Ctrip and Elong), Chinese travel search services (Qunar and Kuxun), other Chinese online services (such as Taobao and Weibo), etc.

Hotels that have been connected onto DerbySoft include the world’s well-known brands such as IHG, Hilton, Carlson- Rezidor, Hyatt, Shangri-La, and Marriott, and more than one thousand smaller hotels in China.

DerbySoft also provides CRS caching services, in which the company saw higher demand recently, thanks to the growth of travel search sites, according to the company, which can overwhelm a hotel CRS with room rate and availability requests.

In late 2013 DerbySoft launched a MetaSearch Manager for hotel room providers to manage and optimize real-time bidding, placement and ad spend on search services like Google.

Founded in 2002 by DerbySoft’s CEO Ted Zhang and CTO Feng Ou, DerbySoft is headquartered in Shanghai, with offices in Dallas, Texas, and London, Beijing and Tokyo.

“We invested in DerbySoft because they are the recognized leader in connecting the world’s largest  hotel companies to the world’s largest online travel sites,” said Hurst Lin, co-founding partner of DCM China. “The vast collections of ‘Big Data’ associated with processing millions of hotel transactions daily provides an opportunity for DerbySoft to further their growth by providing new data-related services.”