Paytm has acquired Delhi-based hotel booking platform NightStay for $20 Million, reports The Times of India. The report adds that NightStay's entire team will join Paytm's team in Noida. When contacted by MediaNama, a Paytm spokesperson declined to comment. A source at the company told MediaNama that the deal yet to be closed. Paytm had started offering hotel booking on its platform in 2015. Entrackr had reported in April that Paytm may be shutting down its Hotels vertical. Paytm's spokesperson had then told Entrackr that the company is launching an updated version of its hotel booking tab. Founded in 2015 by Nasr Khan and Deepak Negi, NightStay is a member-only mobile app, which offers discounted luxury hotel deals in 12 cities including Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Goa, Agra, Jaipur, Chennai and Bangalore. The startup basically curates unsold inventory of the hotels and let users book hotels in last minute on discounted tariffs. In May last year, Nightstay raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by India Angel Network (IAN) and LetsVenture, with the participation of other investors including India Today group's Aroon Purie, former Info Edge CFO Ambarish Raghuvanshi, and Shailesh Vikram Singh, who was then with Seedfund. Before that, it had got seed funding of $500,000 in May 2015 from Vivek Bihani of Bedrock Venture Management Pvt. Ltd, GSF founder Rajesh Sawhney and Shailesh Vikram Singh. Hotel booking segment There are a number of players which offer hotel booking online, including Treebo, OYO Rooms, FabHotels, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Airbnb, to OTAs like MakeMyTrip-GoIbibo, Yatra, and Cleartrip. Last month, Flipkart-owned…
