Ritesh Agarwal, 24, for five years, can build a new hotel worth $ 5 billion

Ritesh Agarwal, 24, for five years, can build a new hotel worth $ 5 billion

Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of Oravel Stays Ltd, is one of the youngest entrepreneurs in India.
Agarwal will go abroad with his branding model, which combines a full-service reservation with full service for small hotel owners who want to stay in hotel. Yesterday, the company raised $ 1 billion from SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital and other investors to expand investment in the country, including China, which Oyo launched in November. Last week, the company started service in the UK, bringing its business to the development market for the first time.


"By 2023, we will be the world's largest chain of hotels," the 24-year-old founder said in an interview. "We want to convert unused property around the world to a good quality living space." In addition, Oyo employs hundreds of people in the field who evaluate real estate on bed mattress quality and chromatographic quality and water temperatures.

Agarwal said the number of transactions had tripled last year, with 90 per cent coming from travelers again and again, and did not spend on advertising. He said there are currently 10,000 hotels in Indian cities and 160 with more than 125,000 rooms listed on the site.

Yesterday, Oo announced that the company was worth $ 5 billion. , Making it the second-most-traded company in India after One97 Communications owns Paytm, a digital payment company funded by Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Agarwal says he never stayed in a hotel until he was recruited to represent his school at a competition that was held in the city when he was only 12 years old. At the time, he felt that hotels and temples in India were still limited. After that he also wanted to make Indian hospitality more flourishing, he learned a hotel business and spent a year cleaning the rooms in old hotels.
In 2013, he received $ 100,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, sponsoring drop-out students to start his own company. Heavy investment came in 2015 when he received $ 100 million from investments from investors including Silicon Valley's Sequoia Capital and Japan's SoftBank Group Corp.

In November, Agarwal brought the business to China, starting with the same list in the industrial city of Shenzhen. Now less than a year later, travelers in the most populous countries in the world can choose from more than 1,000 hotel hotels, Oyo and 87,000 rooms in more than 170 cities in China.