The success journey of Ritesh Agarwal from a dropout to a billionaire is quite inspirational. Ritesh Agarwal, a 30-year-old billionaire from India, is the founder and CEO of the world's most affordable hotel chain, OYO. He started his journey at the age of 20 with a vision of creating a solution for people looking for affordable hotels around the globe and he is on the path of success to achieve his goal.
OYO Rooms on an avergae makes about $56.6 million every month and has 3000+ employees in 800 cities across 80 countries. At just 25 years old, Ritesh became the world's second-youngest self-made billionaire.
Ritesh Agarwal grew up in Titilagarh, Odisha, where his family ran a small shop. He went to St. John’s Senior Secondary School. After that, he moved to Delhi for college but left to start OYO. In 2013, he became the first Indian to join the Thiel Fellowship.
Ritesh was a tech freak from a very young age and he started coding when he was just 10 years old. Another of his passions was to travel around the world. While he travels across India, he realizes that there is a need for affordable hotels which provide decent services in India. The affordable hotels do not provide necessary services such as AC, Wi-Fi, comfortable beds and breakfast facilities.
This gave him a hunch to do something to solve this problem so he combined his love for travel with his obsession with technology to make something useful. It was difficult for him at the beginning as he did not know anything about entrepreneurship, but as he developed his plan and showed it to some investors, he received funding of $100,000, which helped him to kick start his entrepreneurial journey.
Entrepreneurship is not a destination; it's a journey where one has to keep on learning and improving their knowledge and skill set. Ritesh started his journey by launching Oravel Stays, which helped people to locate and book affordable hotels near them. This directory of affordable hotels was helping travellers to find pocket-friendly hotels but it was not serving the purpose for which Ritesh started this company.
Soon he realizes that to solve this problem he needs to have an in-depth research about the hospitality services so he began to travel across India and visited almost hundreds of hotels. After all this, he found that the major problems in the hospitality industry are their non-standard services and unpredictability so he decided to solve these problems with the help of OYO.
Many people don't know that "OYO stands for On Your Own". Ritesh then updated his old business model and converted it into a much better one, which is now known to everyone as OYO Hotels. They start providing affordable rooms with standard facilities in more than 1000 hotels across India and OYO doesn't own any of those hotels. This concept made Ritesh Agarwal a billionaire at the age of 23.
2013: Ritesh Agarwal receives $100,000 grant as part of Thiel Fellowship.
2014: Secures first series A funding.
2015 - March: Attracts $25 million in funding.
2015 - April: Launches OYO app, initiating rapid expansion.
2015 – July: Secures $100 million in series C funding from SoftBank.
2016: Achieves milestone of 1 million check-ins; expands to Malaysia.
2017: Ventures into Nepal market.
2018: Expands globally, establishing presence in UK, UAE, Dubai, China, Singapore, and Indonesia; achieves unicorn status.
2019: Expands to over 500 cities globally, offering more than 330,000 rooms.
As of 2024, Ritesh Agarwal's Net Worth is 16,000 Crore INR equivalent to 160 Billion USD.
Find a major problem and think about how you can solve it
Value your knowledge
Keep on learning about your favourite field and became an expert in it.
Ability to accept your mistakes and improving future
Hard work and patience is really important to succeed
Ritesh Agarwal is a true inspirational story for every Indian boy who wants to achieve something great in her/his life. His unique thinking and ability to solve problems made him the youngest billionaire in India
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