Ritesh Agarwal was only 19 years old when he received the prestigious Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 grant meant to develop young tech talent. “I’ve always had that fire in my heart to do something different from the norm. It was never about making it big, but about finding that thing I truly believed in,” says the now 25-year-old founder of OYO Hotels & Homes. “Getting mentored by Peter Thiel truly changed my worldview. He helped me trust the power of a unique idea, instead of building an Indian version of an American or Chinese company.”
What attracted Thiel was Agarwal’s ingenuity in handling what he saw as a lodging problem in India. “While I was traveling across India on a budget, I realized unbranded hotels lacked minimum baseline standards,” he says. Travelers were forced to compromise on location, quality, and price to find semi-decent accommodations. He set out to fix those flaws via bookings platform Oravel Stays. OYO was launched in 2013 after Agarwal saw the bigger problem was bridging the supply and demand gap. “The solution was to ensure the delivery of standardized stays. Only after you spot a gap in the market can you offer a simple yet powerful solution to it.”
Now, six years later, OYO’s rapidly expanding footprint includes more than 23,000 hotels and 46,000 vacation homes in 74 countries (mostly through reflagging properties), with an ambitious plan to become the largest hotel brand in the world by 2023. By cornering the oft-forgotten budget sector, Agarwal has created an industry unicorn, raising nearly $2 billion in venture capital dollars since its founding and transforming the India-based Agarwal into one of the youngest self-made entrepreneurs worth an estimated $365 million.
A generous investment from Airbnb has helped cement OYO as a global player. “We’re empowering small asset owners with operational capabilities and technology,” he says. “Now, they are able to compete with big hotel chains. Essentially, we help small properties manage daily functions better, like the bookings, customer requests, housekeeping, and finances.”
Recently, OYO announced plans to invest $300 million in the U.S., where it already operates 50 hotels in 23 cities. Setting its sights on tough barrier-to-entry markets like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, Agarwal is more motivated than ever. “Our goal is not just to capture a handsome share but to be bigger than the top three to four chains combined,” he says. “We are just at the beginning of something very big.”
Photography courtesy of OYO Hotels & Homes
