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Oyo Hotels & Homes, a lodging operator backed by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, is betting that the same formula that fuelled the company’s rapid growth in India and China can work in the US.
Oyo, which opened its first US hotel at the beginning of the year, plans to invest $300 million to expand in the country, Chief Executive Officer Ritesh Agarwal said in an interview. The company will use those funds to build out technology, design and operating teams and renovate properties. It’s adding hotels at the pace of one a day, and aims to expand its US offerings at five times that rate by the year-end.
“So far we’ve been very focussed on building a good product and pricing it very effectively for the consumer,” he said. “We want to make sure that we do it right rather than just do it fast. If that means three a day and not five a day, life goes on.”
Agarwal founded Oyo six years ago, at age 19, to remedy what he saw as a lack of good, affordable hotels in his native India. Now, the company operates more than 23,000 properties with more than 850,000 rooms, making it the world’s sixth-largest lodging provider by its own measure. Oyo’s growth has attracted plenty of venture capital, including a $1-billion funding round last year from investors including SoftBank, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Ventures.
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