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Ritesh Agarwal, the 24-year-old founder of hotel chain start-up OYO, is a small-towner who dreamt big.
Born and brought up in Bissamcuttack and Rayagada in Odisha, Agarwal had dropped out of college at 17.
A Thiel Fellow, he founded OYO in May 2013 with one hotel with a few rooms in Gurugram. Today, the start-up operates in 350 cities with over 10,000 asset partners spread across China, Malaysia, Nepal and the UK, apart from India.
OYO started off with rooms at ₹999 that came with all the standard amenities of a branded hotel room, including TV, air-conditioning, hot and cold water, complimentary breakfast and Wi-Fi.
It has since expanded into newer segments with OYO Home, OYO Townhouse and its recently-launched upper mid-scale brand Palette Resorts; and offers rooms priced from Rs 999 to Rs 10,000.
On Tuesday, OYO raised $800 million in Series E funding led by SoftBank, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Ventures, Sequoia and Greenoaks Capital. It also received a commitment of an additional $200 million, bringing the total capital raised in the Series E round to $1 billion.
“In terms of size, this is the most meaningful round of capital we have raised so far, Agarwal told BusinessLine . “With this capital, we plan to rapidly scale up our business in all the five countries we operate in, and continue to invest in technology and talent. We will also deploy fresh capital to take our unique model that enables small hotel owners to create quality living spaces, global.”
OYO is South Asia’s largest and the world’s fastest growing hotel chain, said Agarwal. “We are adding 45,000 rooms every month globally, of which 32,000 rooms are in China and 13,000 are in India. Our full stack technology-led hospitality model has over 2,11,000 franchised and leased rooms as a part of the chain. In India, we have over 1,25,000 rooms and are witnessing 3X growth in transactions year-on-year with healthy margins of over 20 per cent after deducting all costs,” he added.
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