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Venture Capital News: Recharge Grabs $2.3M

2016-06-06
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Recharge, an app for booking hotel rooms by the minute or hour, has raised $2.3 million in seed funding.
According to Reuters, with Recharge, you can pay $0.66 per minute or $40 for an hour to get a private room and turn it into your home away from home -- to shower after a run, take a nap, or fire off some emails in a quiet atmosphere your local Starbucks can't provide.

'Essentially, what we're selling is your house,' Recharge CEO and cofounder Manny Bamfo told Tech Insider. 'There, you have a bed, you have total privacy, you can jump up and down and do a cartwheel. But sometimes, home is just too expensive to get to because of time or distance. That's where we come in.'

Recharge is currently only available on the iPhone. To sign up, type in your phone number or connect to your Facebook account. Recharge asks to send notifications and to use your location when using the app.

To book a room, open Recharge and you're taken to a map view, like you'd find on Uber or Lyft. You can see which partnering hotels are near your current location.

Recharge automatically selects the nearest available hotel to you. In this example, it's the Hyatt Regency, which is one of Recharge's partnering hotels in the pilot city of San Francisco. Currently, that's the only place Recharge is available, but it plans to launch more cities soon.

Once you click 'Book Now,' you're given 15 minutes to arrive at the hotel Recharge has matched you with and check in. You don't have to indicate how long you plan to stay. After 15 minutes, your booking time begins, and you're charged $0.66 for every minute you remain at the hotel.

When you're ready to leave, just press the 'Check Out' button on Recharge's app, and your payment will stop. There isn't any surge pricing on Recharge at the moment, although that may change as demand for the app rises.
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