Whether thinking to drop out or to start off with young blood, the most befitting person who takes a hand is Ritesh Agarwal. For those of you who don’t know him, which is quite rare, he is the founder of Oravel and later Oyo Rooms. At the age of just 22, he has created an unbeatable buzz in the startup era. Let us have a look at how he achieved things so fast.
Hailing from a business family, Ritesh was born in Bissam, Orissa. He did his schooling from Sacred Heart School, Rayagada. He became a software geek at an amazingly early age. He was already codin
g at the age of eight. He was also chosen to be a part of the Asian Science Camp held at TIFR, Mumbai at the age of just 16. From that point, there was no looking back.
Ritesh started his journey as a teenager when he left home and set out to find his fortune. He decided to skip his engineering entrance exams and moved to Delhi. These things quite explicitly explain his quick decision-making powers. Isn’t it? At the age of 17, he was already travelling extensively. He started attending entrepreneurship events wherever he could, sometimes even by sneaking in due to lack of money.
He went on to receive the Thiel Fellowship which paid him $100,000 for dropping out of college and starting up below the age of 20. He was the only Indian to have received such prestige that year. Before laying the foundation of Oyo Rooms, Ritesh also founded Oravel, an Indian clone of Airbnb at the age of 18. He raised 30 Lakhs of funding from Venture Nursery for Oravel.
Finally, Ritesh decided to chuck the idea of Oravel and started Oyo Stays, an online marketplace for affordable stays. He initially raised an amount of 4 Crore from Lightspeed Venture Partners and PSG Consumer Partners, Singapore. Again he raised an amount of $6 million from Sequoia Capital and LSVP when he turned 20.
Till this time, Oyo Rooms has already covered 14,000 rooms across 80 cities in India. The two-year OYO Rooms is not an Airbnb imitator for a number of reasons. Hotel discovery in India is a mammoth task. It is not because they are hard to find, a problem which Airbnb specifically solves by letting travelers to stay at homes of localities. Indian people often encounter nightmares whenever they land up to a certain hotel. The problem gets aggravated when they have booked a hotel online and it turns out to be a disaster. They are then not left with any option because most of the times, a significant amount of payment has already been done. Filthy rooms, leaky washrooms, absence of food and water, unwashed floors are what they encounter.
This is where Oyo Rooms have stepped in to tag the hotels as branded and standardized on 30 major criteria. Free WIFI and breakfast, AC Rooms with TV, spotless linen, hygienic washrooms etc are some of its parameters. Rooms start at rupees 999 and goes up to 1500 rupees. Some premium options range from 2500 rupees to 4000 rupees as well. One can be assured of absolutely no hidden costs. The rooms and services are monitored regularly through its app.
Investors totally trust the ability of this young talent who has done enough to inspire the budding youths in the shell. Investors feel that he has the capability to build and manage any organization successfully. He has a strong grip on all the fractions of business. Somaia of Lightspeed said, “In five minutes he can go from a strategic conversation to drilling down into the minute details important to a property owner”.
