$1,100,000,000
Ritesh Agarwal
Net Worth
Born in (City)
Cuttack
Born in (Country)
Orissa
Date of Birth
16th December, 1993
Date of Death
-
Mother
Not known
Father
Not known
About
Ritesh Agarwal is an Indian Businessman and Founder of Oyo Rooms. The company is well known as OYO which offers budgeted hotels to its customers. Ritesh has started OYO with just one city and it’s now expanded to 230 cities with more than 8500 hotels. Ritesh Agarwal was born on 16th November 1993 in a small town Bisam in Cuttack Orissa. He completed his schooling and also spent his younger days in his birthplace only. He went to Sacred Heart School in Rayagada. Following the completion of schooling, he moved to Indian School of Business and Finance in New Delhi. He is from a middle-class Marwari family who did not have an excellent financial condition. Before becoming a millionaire. The family members of Ritesh Agarwal always supported him with all the decisions he made in his life. He dropped out of college; instead, he commenced his own company in the field in which he was much interested.
Early Life
When he was just seven years old, he started traveling to many places in India but was not much satisfied with his accommodation business. However, he decided to start a hotel business in India. Ritesh loves computers from his childhood which he used to play and learn something new. He started coding at the age of 8 only. He started dreaming at the age of 17 to become an entrepreneur when nobody cares and think about their further studies as well. Ritesh was very fond of moving to a new place and has been to many places worldwide. All through his journeys, he experienced many issues in relation to the accommodation. He has to spend a lot of money in every place and then also cannot get a good place to stay. Sometimes in the lesser budget, he found much better accommodations. Such experience was the real inspiration of Ritesh Agarwal to decide that he should commence his own online booking community. By this, he can provide people with the place to live, and that will also be on the budget.
Road to Success
Ritesh was just 18 when he started Oravel, which is a platform that creates a list of hotels which are available according to the place and where people can book within their after sometime Ritesh realized that providing rooms to people in half value did fulfill the customer’s pleasure by ignoring them. In 2011, Ritesh Agarwal was struggling to raise funds to fuel his dream of running a hotel booking website like AirBnB. The Oyo founder, then a 17-year-old start-up entrepreneur, offered a 15% stake in his company for just ₹30 lakh. Entrepreneur and investor Vishal Gondal was, however, not very convinced with the bold ambitions of the college dropout teenager who was just trying to start Oravel, the parent company of Oyo, with the target of making 9 lakh monthly bookings in four years and ₹650 crore in annual revenues. "It was very interesting to meet this young boy with such bold ambitions. I wasn’t sure I wanted to invest in Oravel. I had my doubts on whether Indians would want to live in strangers’ homes, and the numbers he projected looked crazy big," Gondal wrote in a mint column recently. He added, "Unfortunately, I completely missed the opportunity and, if I had a time machine, the only thing I would want to do is to go back in time and undo my decision," Gondal says. Started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, under which 20 entrepreneurs under the age of 20 are chosen and offered the amount of 100000 dollars. Ritesh applied and was selected and with this became the first person in India to join the Fellowship list. With the help of the amount received, Ritesh Agarwal gave OYO rooms a much superior standard. Following this, the Venture Company also helped Ritesh financially.
Challenges
Ritesh Agarwal is from a middle-class Marwari family who did not have an excellent financial condition. In 2013, he changed the name to ’Oravel’ to OYO Rooms in which he offers low-cost, comfortable rooms. In 2011 Ritesh Agarwal’s net worth from Oreg was 60000 rupees from one hotel in Gurgaon. For the financial support which his company needed he headed towards the 20 under 20 Fellowship. When entrepreneur and investor Vishal Gondal first met Ritesh Agarwal in 2011, the Oyo founder was still struggling to raise funds, Gondal was offered a stake in Oravel Stays, the parent company of Oyo, for just ₹30 lakh in 2011. Despite being one of the most successful startup brands in India, OYO’s rise to prominence has not been free of controversy.
Failures
In particular, the company’s relationships with its hotel partners has been a constant source of scandals and issues. As recently as this year, OYO hotel partners across India are protesting non-payment of dues from the company. Inc42’s report in August 2019 showed how OYO hotel partners alleged that the company used arbitrary fees and hidden charges to eat into hotel profits. Independent protests by small hotel owners are springing up in mid-tier towns like Nashik, Pune, Kota, Manali, Jaipur and Ahmedabad as well as Bengaluru and Delhi. Hoteliers claim that OYO has been cheating them of their promised returns and minimum guarantees by levying a slew of charges, often without informing them. Many of these charges are not specified in the contract between the owner and OYO, hotel owners that Inc42 spoke to, alleged.
Achievements
Ritesh Agarwal’s story is one of the biggest success stories in the Indian startup ecosystem, and today has a presence across India, China, UAE, Malaysia, Nepal, US, some European countries and Indonesia.|OYO claims to be the world’s second-largest chain of hotels, homes, managed living and workspaces.|Today the name of OYO Hotels is known to be India’ largest budget branded hotel chain.