Ritesh Agarwal’s Journey To OYO Rooms

Introduction to OYO rooms 

We are all aware of OYO rooms which is a very successful start-up. OYO rooms is India’s largest budget hotel chain with about 50,000 rooms in 500 hotels all over the nation. Oyo doesn’t own hotels, instead, it ties up with certain hotels and acquires some rooms to be given out to people who want to avail OYO services. It focuses on standardizing the hotels in the non-branded hospitality sector. Oyo rooms is a very successful venture as it has managed to solve the issue of affordability, cleanliness, and availability of budget hotels across all Tier-I and Tier-II cities in the country.

Sadly, we hardly know anything about the man behind OYO rooms. Ritesh Agarwal, a successful entrepreneur is only 23 years old and has several accolades to his credit. 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.

Ritesh Agarwal’s journey To become the Youngest CEO at 17 

Entrepreneurship cannot be taught in college. Not at least to Ritesh Agarwal. For this 23-year-old founder of OYO Rooms, India’s largest branded network of budget hotels, it all comes from within. One would have read the signs when, at 13, this boy from small-town Odisha began to make money by selling SIM cards. Four years later, he dropped out of college to take the entrepreneurial plunge. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” recalls Agarwal. In 2009, Agarwal moved to Kota and was preparing for his engineering entrance exam. But that took a back seat after he attended the TiE Global Summit in Delhi; thereafter he would take an overnight train from Kota to Delhi almost every weekend to understand the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. In 2012, at 18, he launched Oravel Stays, a website designed to enable listing and booking of budget accommodation. “The idea was to make small hotels, bed-and-breakfasts, and inns more accessible to travelers.”

After setting up Oravel Stays, Agarwal traveled for over three months and stayed in over 100 bed-and-breakfasts, guest houses and small hotels. “The real problem for the traveler has not lacked awareness, but lack of trust. If you were lucky, you would end up having a comfortable stay. Otherwise, the issues could range from poor quality bed linen, dirty washrooms to even disinterested or rude staff,” he says. It was this realisation that got him to pivot Oravel to OYO in 2013. It partners with hotels to standardise rooms to give travelers a similar experience across cities. OYO not only lends its name but also trains in-house staff to ensure uniformity of services in return for a 20 percent commission on booking value.

“In many emerging markets, including India, there are significant trust deficits which have to be overcome, especially in the sharing or person-to-person economy. With OYO, Ritesh pioneered a business model that standardized short-stay accommodation to offer customers a predictable and affordable experience,” says Bejul Somaia, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital fund that invested an undisclosed amount in the startup in 2014. Subsequently, OYO raised four rounds of funding. Its other investors include Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks Capital Partners, and Japan’s SoftBank Group; the Japanese major is said to be in talks to invest further in OYO at a valuation of around $800-plus million, according to a source. (Agarwal declined to comment on this.)

 Interesting facts and Achievements of Ritesh Agarwal

• Ritesh Aggarwal is as interesting as his idea. His journey as an entrepreneur was not a very smooth one; he had to deal with failures and difficulties to be on the top. Below listed are some of the interesting facts that will keep you interested to the edge.
• He loves to travel and while traveling he discovered that there is a problem in getting good rooms with good facilities at affordable rates.
• At just 17 years of age, he invented Travel travels, modeled after Airbnb, which later branched out to become OYO Rooms. Later on, he launched OYO to eradicate the problem of the availability of the budget rooms in Hotels.
• Ritesh Agarwal has benefited the society in more than one ways. He has also managed to achieve what most of the people only think of.

Below listed are some of the accomplishments of this teenager 

Achievements of Ritesh Agarwal

• He has been named among the top 50 entrepreneurs by the TATA first dot awards in 2013.
• Finalist of the global student Entrepreneurship Awards India.
• He has been named one of the 8 hottest teenage startup founders in the world by a BusinessInsider in the year 2013.
• He is the World’s youngest CEO at 17.