Entrepreneurship: Our model has created 30 ‘copycats’: OYO’s Ritesh Agarwal

At the age of 17, most youngsters don’t have any inkling of what their future would look like. Not Ritesh Agarwal.

A year before his 18th birthday, Agarwal was managing his first hotel in Gurgaon. He started Oravel, an Indian version of the online rental site Airbnb, which later pivoted to budget hotels aggregator OYO Rooms.

Today, the two-year old OYO Rooms is valued at $400 million. It recently raised $100 million (Rs 635 crore) in a fresh round of funding led by Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank.

OYO Room’s successful run has attracted several new players into the online aggregation space for budget hotels.

“We are glad that there are 30 copycats of a brand that we created…But their only problem is that they can’t innovate like us,” Agarwal said in an interview with Techcircle.in. He claims that OYO Rooms has 90 per cent market share in the rooms aggregation play.

OYO currently caters to over 15,000 rooms in 90 cities. With the fresh investment, the company is gunning for 50,000 rooms across 100 cities by the end of this year.

Those offering a branded booking platform like OYO Rooms include Zo Rooms, ZiP Rooms and Wudstay, Zo Rooms, Zen Rooms and Ibibo’s goStays among others. A former executive of OYO Rooms has also plunged into the burgeoning budget hotels aggregation space by co-founding a new venture, Vista Rooms that could potentially compete with her previous employer.

Ruling out the possibility of acute competition, Agarwal said that entry of new players will only solve the problems faced by guests and ensures standardisation. He suggested that small players would eventually have to consolidate in a bid to effectively compete with OYO Rooms.

Agarwal, who hails from a small town in Southern Odisha, believes that factors such as standardisation, trust and assurance of quality, distinguish OYO from its competitors. “The form or size of rooms on our network may be different. However, in every room you will find a bed with satin cover, a 32 inch LCD TV and warm white light,” said Agarwal, one of few Indians to be selected for the prestigious Thiel fellowship.

He also spoke highly of Softbank, OYO Rooms’ investor. The Japanese telecom and internet major, he claimed, has helped the startup with insights on how to build a company for the long-term.