Travel booking website Yatra has raised Rs 140 crore in funding from IDG Ventures India and Vertex Venture Holdings, reports The Economic Times. Earlier investors Norwest Venture Partners, Intel Capital, TV18 Group and Reliance Venture Asset Management also participated in this round, increasing the stake of institutional investors in the company to 80%. The company will use the funds raised for branding, expanding its hotels bookings business and improving its mobile offering. Focus on hotels: The company has reported revenue of $50 million for the financial year ended 2014 and 30% of its topline currently comes from the hotels and holiday packages segment. It also wants to increase the number of hotels under its fold to 30,000 by FY15 up from existing 15,000 hotels. Do note that Yatra had acquired hotel aggregator Travelguru from Travelocity in 2012. Yatra's competitor MakeMyTrip has also been spending aggressively to improve its hotel booking business that accounted for 38.4% of its net revenues for Q3-FY14. Hotels business also registered a 40.1% YoY increase in net revenues to $10.99 million for the company during the same period. As far as focus on mobile is concerned, other travel companies had told MediaNama about the rising relevance of mobile in our Outlook14 report on travel industry in India. In case of Cleartrip up to 25% of its traffic came from mobile last year, while for Ixigo's Aloke Bajpai had said that mobile bookings are expected to reach 25% this year. Acquisition on the cards: It is also looking to acquire a few companies and Yatra…
