Platform for budget hotels, Oyo Rooms, raises $25M funding from Lightspeed, Sequoia, others

Wednesday March 25, 2015 , 2 min Read

Ritesh Agarwal led network of branded budget hotels Oyo Rooms has raised $25 million from Lightspeed Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks Capital and DSG Consumer Partners. The company will use funding to realize its ambition of becoming the largest technology-enabled network of hotels globally.

OYO Rooms leverages technology and enables consumers to have hassle-free budget hotel booking experience while it helps hotels/guesthouses to increase their occupancy.

Started in 2013, OYO Rooms claims to have grown to more than 200 hotels in 10 cities; booking 50,000 room nights every month. The Gurgaon based company intends to expand its network to 1000 hotels in 25 cities by this year end.Importantly, the funding comes after Chennai based online accommodation bookings marketplace Stayzilla raised $20 million Series B round in February this year.

Announcing the fresh round of fund raise, Ritesh Agarwal, CEO of OYO Rooms said, “Our vision is to offer the ‘OYO Rooms experience’ to every business, leisure and pilgrim traveler across 100 cities through a network of 10,000 hotels. We welcome Greenoaks as a partner and are very excited to work with them. Our current investors- Lightspeed, Sequoia and DSG have been great partners in helping us build and scale the company.”

Ritesh Agarwal was selected for the “20 under 20” Thiel Fellowship in 2013. The Thiel Fellowship is a two-year program wherein fellows receive $100,000 and mentorship from the foundation’s network of tech entrepreneurs, investors and scientists.

Bejul Somaia, MD at Lightspeed India said, “The economy stays segment is a large, unorganized and fragmented market and we believe that OYO brings a new, scalable and customer-friendly approach to addressing this opportunity. Ritesh and Abhinav have forged a strong partnership to build OYO. We look forward to helping them in fulfilling their mission of building the world’s largest technology-enabled hotel network.”

The Gurgaon-based company competes with Zostel which also keeps its own inventory. Stayzilla follows a pure-play aggregation approach.

The travel space is again seeing activity now, across the funnel. Trip planning has seen investor interest with Tripoto picking up a Series A round. Another Bengaluru-based travel marketplace iTraveller is picking up steam. ixigo has been aggressive on mobile and is widening its scope apart from big OTAs like Makemytrip.

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