OYO Rooms was started as Oravel in 2011 by the then 18-year-old Ritesh Agarwal. After graduating from the Peter Thiel Fellowship program, Oravel pivoted to Oyo Rooms – a chain of branded budget hotels across several cities in India. OYO Rooms is the country’s largest budget hotel chain with about 1 million rooms in 23,000 hotels all over India.The company is backed by investors like the Softbank Group, Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Lightspeed India and is one of the leading startup unicorns in the hotel industry.
The teenage boy – Ritesh Agarwal is the young Founder & CEO of OYO Rooms – the fastest-growing branded network of hotels offline & online. A college dropout, who once wanted to sit for an engineering exam, Ritesh today heads among the most valuable start-up by a person who never studied beyond school. The journey of our hero began rather early than normal!
Born to a humble family in Cuttack, his journey of becoming a successful entrepreneur wasn’t a very smooth one. In fact, in the era of start-ups, he had to face certain difficulties in trying to battle it out to make his unconventional idea work.
To pursue his passion for becoming an entrepreneur, he enrolled in the Indian School of Business & Finance, Delhi but left college mid-way to start his own company. He was hesitant about his decision but from the beginning, he was very clear about what he wanted to do and took some tough choices to accomplish his dreams.
Ritesh was born to a business class family in Bissam Cuttack in Orissa and attended the Sacred Heart School in Rayagada, Orissa. During the growing up days in Rayagada, Odisha, it was all about fun and learning for him but his ways were rather unconventional from those of other kids. His fun elements included screwing around with the computer and trying hard to find opportunities to make mistakes so that he could learn new stuff. And doing that he gained a keen interest in software!
This started with the idea of it, moved on to know about it and then the hunger just went on increasing. To quench his thirst, he borrowed his elder brother’s books for programming. Some of the basic languages like Basic and Pascal were taught in the school itself and the rest he managed to learn from Google. He even sold sim cards to survive, afraid his family would end his entrepreneurial dreams and summon him back home to Odisha if they knew of his struggles.
In Kota(Rajasthan), where he was ostensibly preparing for his IIT entrance exams, Ritesh says he couldn’t wait every weekend to slip out to Delhi and meet those doing their own thing. This 19-year-old had traveled for months staying at budget hotels, attended customer calls every day, and immersed himself in every possible experience to learn about budget hotel customers and their expectations. That was the kind of on-the-ground learning that helped him pivot Oravel to Oyo.
He has traveled all over the country and during such travels, discovered the problem with budget hotels. At the age of 17, he launched Oravel travels, modeled after Airbnb, which later branched out to become OYO rooms. Soon he discovered that the problem with budget hotels was bigger than just availability, so, to counter other issues, he launched OYO.
In 2014; the company raised Rs. 4 Cr from Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP) and DSG Consumer Partners, at a pre-money valuation (valuation of a company before investment or financing) of Rs 14 Cr. What motivated Ritesh, even more, was that by now the company was clocking gross bookings of more than Rs.1 Cr. per month.
Since then; OYO Rooms has gone on to become India’s first technology-driven network of standardized branded budget hotels and has also widely expanded its presence to 20,000+ hotels and more than 1 million rooms in 337 cities like Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Goa, Jaipur, Hyderabad, etc.
Additionally, their OYO Rooms mobile app has been downloaded more than 10 million times and more than 5 million bookings have been made so far. The app ranks amongst the best-rated apps on Google Play Store and has also been listed as one of the top three apps in the ‘Travel & Local’ category.
The company has also raised another $25 Million from Lightspeed, Sequoia and others. In the latest news, OYO’s founder Ritesh Agarwal has purchased $2 billion in shares from venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed venture partners.
Eduindex News 