About
Ritesh Agarwal is the 31‑year‑old force behind OYO Hotels & Homes, the budget‑hospitality brand he launched in 2013 after tinkering with an earlier listing service called Oravel Stays. Twelve years on, OYO franchises and leases more than a million rooms in roughly 80 countries, from India and Southeast Asia to Europe and the United States. In early 2025 the firm is hustling toward a long‑promised stock‑market debut—an effort partly driven by a looming deadline to repay a US $383 million loan that Agarwal personally guaranteed.
Ever the hands‑on founder, he told an audience at Mumbai Tech Week in March 2025 that he still slips on gloves to scrub hotel washrooms now and then, framing the chore as a reminder that leadership starts with humility.
Before Fame
Born on 16 November 1993 in the small Odisha town of Bissam Cuttack and raised in nearby Rayagada, Agarwal showed an early taste for hustle—selling prepaid SIM cards at thirteen and teaching himself basic coding. After secondary school he moved to Delhi, briefly enrolling in college before deciding the classroom was slowing him down. He spent months backpacking across India’s cheapest guesthouses, obsessively noting what worked and what didn’t.
At nineteen he created Oravel Stays, an online directory for budget rooms, but soon realized travelers needed standardized stays more than another listing site. His pivot to OYO (“On Your Own”) came in 2013, the same year he won the US‑based Thiel Fellowship and its US $100,000 grant. The fellowship’s mandate—“skip college, build something bold”—perfectly matched his ambitions, letting him pour the funds into re‑branding, early staff salaries, and a crash course in global startup networks.
Trivia
- Young billionaire: Agarwal was India’s youngest self‑made billionaire on the Hurun rich list at just 24.
- Learning by doing: He once spent weeks living inside OYO properties under a pseudonym to test housekeeping standards—and still cleans bathrooms to set an example.
- Profit push: After a turbulent pandemic stretch, he now forecasts an EBITDA of around ₹1,550 crore (about US $185 million) for FY 2025, boosted by OYO’s late‑2024 purchase of G6 Hospitality (Motel 6 and Studio 6) in the United States.
- IPO race: OYO is fast‑tracking its public offering because lenders want clarity on that US $383 million tranche by October 2025—an unusually high‑stakes deadline even in Indian tech circles.
- Bookworm on the road: Friends say Agarwal’s carry‑on always holds a notebook and at least one dog‑eared business biography; he swears the habit sparks new product ideas during red‑eye flights.
Family Life
Ritesh comes from a modest Marwari business family. His father, Ramesh Agarwal, ran a small shop and encouraged his curiosity but died suddenly in March 2023, a loss the founder has called his “toughest quarter by far.” His mother, two sisters, and a brother remain largely private.
In the same year, he married Geetansha Sood, a design entrepreneur he’d known for years. The couple welcomed a son, Aryan, later in 2023. In February 2025 Agarwal shared a video of father and toddler boating at the Mahakumbh Mela in Prayagraj, reflecting on how the festival once sparked OYO’s earliest big idea.
Associated With
- SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son: Early backer whose Vision Fund injection propelled OYO’s rapid global expansion.
- Peter Thiel: The tech investor’s fellowship gave Agarwal seed capital and a Silicon Valley peer group in 2013.
- Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital India: First institutional investors that financed OYO’s pivot from listings to branded stays.
- G6 Hospitality: Acquired by OYO in 2024, giving the company a foothold in North America’s roadside‑motel market.
- Indian startup peers: Often appears alongside Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal to champion frugal innovation and “India‑to‑the‑world” scale.
From a teenager hawking phone cards in Odisha to a CEO scrubbing his own washrooms while steering a global IPO, Ritesh Agarwal’s story remains a case study in relentless, down‑to‑earth ambition—without ever losing sight of the budget traveler he once was himself.
