As a college-thrower 24-year-old guy built a business for $ 5 billion

Finding clean hotels with affordable prices in India can be a nightmare for any traveler.

Photos: YouTube

Too often, what looks good on a website turns out to be a dilapidated room with mold and a broken shower in reality, writes Time.

But Ritesh Agarwal has found a solution to this problem - this is an application for booking hotels, in which only real information is written about them, and upon arrival the traveler does not encounter unpleasant surprises. The chain of advanced hotels that he began creating in 2013 - Oyo hotels — has already become the largest in India.

Agarwal works on this principle: he sells his franchise to hotels abroad, which combines a booking site with a full range of services for smaller hotels that want to improve. 25 September, the company said it was going to attract $ 1 billion from SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital and other investors to finance its expansion in other countries, including China, where the first Oyo hotel opened in November last year. Last week, this franchise hotel also began operating in the UK.

“By 2023, we will be the world's largest hotel chain,” said Agarwal, 24, explaining that he is transforming underperforming hotels into better, more comfortable accommodations.

Oyo has hundreds of employees who evaluate 200 factors in the quality of hotel performance: from the quality of mattresses and bedding to the water temperature. To enter the network, most hoteliers must agree to a renovation, which usually takes about a month. Oyo then receives 25% of each reservation. Numbers usually range from 25 to 85 dollars per day.

Agarwal refused to disclose sales, but said that last year the number of transactions had tripled compared to the previous year, with 90% bookings accounted for repeat travelers, which allows the company to flourish without actually spending money on advertising. According to him, in 160 Indian cities there are more than 10 000 hotels of the network, offering more than 125 000 numbers.

The 25 announced September round of investments raises the company's overall valuation to 5 billion dollars, making this hotel chain the second most expensive hotel in India.

Agarwal, who dropped out of college, became an atypical business star for a country where higher education is highly valued.

He said that an idea occurred to him while traveling in India as a teenager. Then he found out that finding a budget and quality hotel in the country is almost impossible.

In 2013, he received a grant of 100 000 dollars from Peter Tel, co-founder of PayPal, which supports students who drop out to start their own business. The big breakthrough came in 2015, when he received 100 million dollars in venture financing from investors, including Sequoia Capital Silicon Valley and the Japanese SoftBank Group Corp.

In November, 2017, Agarwal expanded its business to China, starting with a single hotel in the industrial city of Shenzhen. Now, in less than a year, travelers in the most populous country in the world can choose from more than 1000 hotels owned by Oyo in more than 170 Chinese cities.

Read also on ForumDaily:

How to conquer Silicon Valley: tips of three Russians who succeeded

How our immigrants become rich in the USA: three stories

As a native of Belarus built a business on the love of Americans for art

How an immigrant from Russia turned a hobby into a successful business in Israel

Do you want more important and interesting news about life in the USA and immigration to America? — support us donate! Also subscribe to our page Facebook. Select the “Priority in display” option and read us first. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our РєР ° РЅР ° Р »РІ Telegram  and Instagram- there is a lot of interesting things there. And join thousands of readers ForumDaily New York — there you will find a lot of interesting and positive information about life in the metropolis.