The success story: The inspiring story of Oyo Rooms’ Ritesh Agarwal

Team Udayavani, Sep 10, 2020, 2:21 PM IST

OYO Rooms is one of the fastest growing Branded network of hotels offline & online. Ritesh Agarwal is the founder and CEO of OYO Hotels & Homes.

At the age of 17, he travelled across India and stayed in more than 100 bed and breakfasts, guest houses, and hotels. He realized that there was a massive dearth of affordable and good-quality hotels in the budget hotel category.

Ritesh believed that everyone deserves a  budget friendly and comfortable living space. Ritesh launched OYO  in May 2013

Initially, in 2011, it was started as Oravel and after graduating from the Peter Thiel Fellowship program, Oravel pivoted to Oyo Rooms,  a chain of branded budget hotels across several cities in India.

Ritesh had earlier enrolled into Indian School of Business & Finance, Delhi however he left the college mid-way to start his own company.

Agarwal started coding at the tender age of 8 and at the age of 16, he got a chance to be one of the 240 students who were a part of an Asian camp held at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

“OYO stands for On Your Own”. In the Oyo model, hotels are not owned, instead Oyo ties up with certain hotels and acquires a few rooms to be given to people who want to avail the services of OYO.

According to Our Own Startup, Oyo rooms raised $1 billion in September 2018, even a year after that in July 2019 Ritesh Agarwal bought $2 billion in shares in the company, which tripled his shares.

In the year 2020, Agarwal’s net worth is around INR 7253 crore which is $1.1 billion dollars as per the Hurun Rich List 2020 making him the world’s youngest self made billionaire after Kylie Jenner.