Airbnb may face even more intense competition in the world’s largest Internet market, as its Chinese rival Tujia beefs up its business with 300 million US dollars in fresh funding.

This puts the Beijing-based short-term lodging rental site’s valuation at 1.5 billion US dollars, the company’s CEO announced in a letter to staff on Tuesday. Though its estimate worth trails far behind its US counterpart Airbnb, which was last valued at 31 billion US dollars, the Chinese player may be well ahead of the game at home.

Tujia’s founder Luo Jun said in a statement that the funds would be used to help improve and standardize the firm’s accommodation, and that it would “further invest in the domestic high-end real estate market and in foreign markets.”

The investment round was led by Chinese travel agent Ctrip.com International Ltd., who has backed the startup at every stage since its first round of funding in 2012, in a bid to expand its supply chain in accommodation services in addition to tour and flight bookings.

Other investors include All-Stars Investment, China Renaissance’s New Economy Fund, G Street Capital and Glade Brook Capital Partners. The latter two investment firms also bankrolled Tujia’s San Francisco-based competitor Airbnb in fundraising which took place last September.

Though Tujia began building its homestay-sharing platform in 2011, three years after Airbnb pioneered the idea and is therefore frequently referred to as Airbnb’s duplicate in China. But the homegrown business has accumulated an edge that only a local player can attain – Tujia hosts some 400,000 rooms on its platform, with “several hundred thousand customers making booking inquiries every day. Its US counterpart’s 80,000 or rooms available in China as of July pales in comparison.

Airbnb was late to the game, officially incorporating its Chinese entity in December last year and first appealing to the nation’s users with the Chinese name “Aibiying,” meaning welcome each other with love, in March. 

By then, Tujia had already began making moves for consolidation, acquiring a smaller rival Mayi, developed by local services provider 58.com, in June 2016, and months later, followed with an even more significant move merging with the lodging rental operations under Ctrip and Qunar.

The new funding will power Tujia as it takes on Airbnb’s ambitions in China, which include accelerating to become the leading shared lodging operator in the nation, quadrupling its China engineering team in the process.

Meanwhile, Tujia is expected to make major expansions in Japan, a popular travel destination for China’s emerging middle class, leveraging houses and apartments owned by overseas Chinese, and boost the number of Japanese listings by ten-fold, said a company executive in a recent interview with Bloomberg.