The teenage boy Ritesh Agarwal is the young founder and CEO of Oyo Rooms. The fastest growing branded network hurdles offline and online. With the current valuation of over $400 million dollars. Oyo rooms does nothing out of the box. But provides travellers the coolest yet cheapest, efficient and standardised budget rooms. Personally Ritesh with his common man qualities of tall, thin and scruffy alert isn’t easy to find in a crowd. But mind you this is also the look of the founder who puts in as much as 16 hours a day to make his dream come true and has been through a wild journey. Today we talk about the success story of this mastermind team behind Oyo Rooms Ritesh Agarwal.
Ritesh was born to a business family in Odisha and attended the sacred heart school in Raigar, Odisha. During the growing up days in Raigar, it was all about fun and learning for him. But his ways were rather unconventional from those of other kids. His fun elements included screwing around with the computer and trying hard to find opportunities to make mistakes so that he could learn new stuff. And doing that he gained a keen interest in software. This started with the idea of it.
Moved on to knowing more about it and then the hunger just went on increasing. To quench his thirst to know more. He his elder brothers books for programming. Some of the fundamental languages like basic and Paschal were taught in school itself. And the rest he managed to learn from Google. Interestingly he had started coding when he was just 8 years old. So software had obviously become his first lab. And by the time he raised his 10th grade. He had made up his mind that he wanted to take up coding for a living.Later in 2011 Ritesh moved to Delhi with strong intentions of starting up something of his own and at the same time to also prepare for SAT to move to the US for further studies. But fortunately or unfortunately SAT never happened. And he used to do nothing but meet and read about entrepreneurs, startups, businesses and especially Airbnb.
Ritesh later joined the University of London’s course at Indian Business School. But just after three days of joining he couldn’t control his craving to kick start his venture. So he took a days leave to work on the project and finally he never went back.Ritesh always felt that budget hurdles in India didn’t even meet the very basic needs of a budget traveller. Hence capitalizing on this opportunity. He started his first venture in 2012 and called it arrival stays.It was an aggregator of bed and breakfast stays across India. In a matter of no time he also secured funding of 30 lakhs from venture nursery. An accelerator firm which brought together a bunch of storied investors to nurture startups.With sufficient money in his pockets. He started working on his new found interest and at the same time he also presented his idea at the fellowship. A global contest for students under the age of twenty-two.
He managed to raise amongst the top 10 winners and received a sum of 00thousanddollars from Peter Theo. The co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. With this new found confidence. He started working even more rigorously.But to his hard luck. Their business model didn’t seem to be picking up. And as much as he tried to fix things. Things just weren’t falling in place. Ritesh even got Manish Sinha of Gurgaon base cinema stays as their co-founders. But unfortunately it still didn’t help and Manish eventually had to quit the company.That is when Ritesh went into the thinking mode and realise that the biggest pain while travelling was to find a good, affordable and most importantly available but like always most of us ended up staying in a crappy place with equally crappy staff and food which killed the whole trend. This got him motivated again to create an online yet social community to bring information about all good places together on one platform.And as a last resort Ritesh tweaked his present business model and in twenty thirty he relaunched Oraval as OYO rooms.
Pradeem Oyo means on your own and was nothing but an idea to create India’s largest chain of efficient, young and standardised budget rooms. Later in 2014, the company raised four crores from light speed venture partners and DSG consumer partners at a pre money valuation of 14 crore. What motivate Rutesh even more was the fact that the company was clocking a gross bookings of more than one crore per month.Since then Oyo Rooms has went on to become India’s first technology driven network of standardised branded budget hotels and has also widely expanded its presence to major cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad.
The Android app of Oyo Rooms has over 5 million downloads and the app ranks amongst the best rated apps on Google Play Store and has also been listed as one of the top three apps in the travel and local category.Well Pritesh was one of the rare persons who not only dreamt big but also kept a vision to achieve bigger. His success story is the right example about how young minds can build bigger dreams and make it happen for all who wish success in life.The journey of Ritesh Agarwal is truly amazing and we hope he excels even further in his career. And make Oyo rooms a global brand.One of the richest persons in the world and MDN chairman of Reliance Industries which is the largest Indian private sector enterprise Mukesh Diru
