Ritesh Agarwal, founder of OYO Rooms, was named the ‘youngest self-made entrepreneur’ in the recently released Barclays Hurun India Rich List 2018.
Recognised as one of the top five unicorn start-ups in India, OYO Rooms is an undisputed “the next generation hotel chain”. The brain behind this five-year-old start-up is Ritesh Agarwal, the 24-year-old entrepreneur whose net worth shot up to Rs 2,600 crore after his company announced the latest funding of $800 million from its investors on Tuesday.
The icing on the cake is the recently released Barclays Hurun India Rich List 2018, which featured Ritesh as the ‘youngest self-made entrepreneur’.Under its ‘young and rich’ category, the report says: “Youngest self-made entrepreneur under 40 is Ritesh Agarwal, 24, of OYO Rooms with a net worth of Rs 2600 crore.” The wealthiest in the list is Divyank Turakhia (36) of Media.net. The average wealth of self-made entrepreneurs under 40 is Rs 4,400 crore. Shradha Agarwal (33) of Outcome Health is the only self-made women under 40. In total, 21 women under the age of 40 were featured in the Barclays Hurun India Rich List 2018.
OYO Rooms is also among the ‘creme de la creme’ of the 25 most sought-after start-ups in India, a recent LinkedIn survey revealed after OYO announced that it had raised $800 million from Japanese tech fund, Softbank Vision Fund, for a valuation of $5 billion. The company also received an additional commitment of $200 million, taking the total funding to $1 billion.
“In the last 12 months, we have increased our footprint to five countries — India, China, Malaysia, Nepal, and more recently in the UK. With this additional funding, we plan to rapidly scale our business in these countries, while continuing to invest further in technology and talent,” OYO founder and chief executive Ritesh Agarwal said after the latest round of funding.
OYO is already India’s largest hotel network with more than 100,000 rooms in 350 cities, as opposed to Marriott’s 23,000 and Taj Hotel’s 17,000. Close to turning profitable, OYO Rooms has over 10,000 asset partners spread across five countries, including India, China, Malaysia, Nepal and the UK.
