Startup model of OYO ROOMS

Ritesh Aggarwal
A college dropout, who once wanted to sit for an engineering exam, Ritesh today heads among
the most valuable start-up by a person who never studied beyond school.

He even sold sim cards to survive, afraid his well off family would end his entrepreneurial
dreams and summon him back home to Odisha if they knew of his struggles.

In Kota(Rajasthan), where he was ostensibly preparing for his IIT entrance exams, Ritesh says he
couldn't wait every weekend to slip out to Delhi and meet those doing their own thing.

This 19-year-old had traveled for months staying at budget hotels, attended customer calls
everyday and immersed himself in every possible experience to learn about budget hotel
customers and their expectations. That was the kind of on-the-ground learning that helped him
pivot Oravel to Oyo.

Ritesh started his entrepreneurial journey when he was 17 years old. He dropped out of college
and launched his first start-up Oravel Stays Pvt. Ltd. in the year 2012. Oravel was designed as a
platform to enable listing and booking of budget accommodation. Being an avid traveler, he
soon realized that the budget hospitality sector lacked predictability. Therefore, he pivoted

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Oravel to OYO Rooms in 2013 with the key proposition of offering affordable and standardized
accommodation.

According to a research carried out by CB Insights for The New York Times, OYO Rooms is
among the companies that may be the next start-up unicorns. The company is backed by
investors like the Softbank Group, Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed India

Ritesh Agarwal was selected for the 20 under 20 Thiel Fellowship in 2013. The Thiel
Fellowship is a two-year program wherein fellows receive $100,000 and mentorship from the
foundations network of tech entrepreneurs, investors and scientists.

Meet 21 year old, Multi- Millionaire here

2016, year-in-review:

This year, they focused on strengthening their leadership team with the hiring of Anil Goel as
their first CTO and Smriti Subramanian as their General Counsel.

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In September, OYO introduced a guaranteed early check-in called sunrise check-in at 6 am, and
also recently rolled out OYO Captain, a personalised concierge service in the budget hotel
category. It moved into a larger office in Gurgaon and opened a new office in Kochi.

They won the Quest Experience Award for Best Use of Social Media for Customer Experience
(CX) Improvement and were a runner-up in the Hotelier India award for front desk
management.

Learnings from 2016:

Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of OYO, told YourStory, Focused and relentless commitment
to high-quality guest experience has helped us maintain momentum and become the preferred
choice of accommodation for our guests. This year, we were able to crystallise our mission -
Quality living at the right location at the right prices - further. We are geared up to take
responsibility for the repair and maintenance of quality real-estate supply, which is the biggest
bottleneck in the growth of the category. Our experience, having managed over five million
check-ins from Ladakh to Kanyakumari, helps us understand both supply and customer
concerns.

He further added, We also realise that to continuously raise our standards, we need the right
manpower at our properties; so, we have established the OYO Skill Institute to train people and
create a pipeline of skilled workforce for the hospitality industry.

Key Milestones till 2016:

Grew our network to over 70,000 rooms in 7,000 properties across 200 cities to become the
largest hotel network in India

Recorded average Tripadvisor rating of 4.3

More than 100 OYOs are now listed in the top-10 hotel rankings* for their city (including in
Noida and Bengaluru)

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* Specialty lodging category