Inside OYO Rooms: From 2013 to Now Into a $4.1 billion business
Startup Type:
Headquarter: Gurugram, India
Current Status: Active (private; scaled back and refocusing on core markets; potential IPO plans)
Founders: Ritesh Agarwal
Founded Year: 2013
Investors: SoftBank, Sequoia Capital India, Lightspeed India
Funding Raised: $4.1 billion
What Is the business model of OYO Rooms?
Hospitality startup that partners with budget hotels and guesthouses, rebranding them as OYO and standardizing service, making money through revenue sharing and franchise fees
How OYO Rooms got started?
Agarwal founded OYO at 19 in India as an aggregator for budget hotel rooms after traveling and seeing the inconsistent quality, launched in 2013 by contracting small hotels, improving basic amenities, and marketing them under the OYO brand via its app
what growth strategy has OYO Rooms followed?
Achieved explosive growth in India by onboarding thousands of properties quickly, leveraging a playbook of heavy discounts and a simple booking app for consumers, and raised huge capital from SoftBank to replicate the model globally before facing operational challenges
what are the top products/features of OYO Rooms
OYO Hotels network, OYO app for booking budget stays, OYO Townhouse
what was the biggest challenge faced by OYO Rooms?
Rapid international expansion (into China, Europe, US) led to management and quality control issues, and the pandemic in 2020 severely hit occupancy rates, forcing OYO to downsize and restructure to survive