News Highlight: OYO Rooms grabs Startup of the Year in the award function of ET Startup Awards 2018 on Saturday.
OYO Rooms won the ” Startup of the Year ” award during the award function called ET Startup Awards 2018 hosted by Economic Times, an Indian English daily newspaper owned by The Times Group.
Ritesh Agarwal, founder of OYO Rooms, along with his four other company colleagues after being requested on the stage, received the award from the chief guests named Amitabh Kant and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys.
The 2013 launched hotel aggregator OYO was selected for the award based on its greatest growth showed in the year 2018.
OYO Rooms has become the largest hotel network and hospitality service provider in India. The startup was founded in 2013 by a twenty-four year Cuttack, Odisha based entrepreneur named Ritesh Agarwal.
Passing through a challenging initial stage and starting with just a single hotel in January 2013, OYO has scaled its presence in 230 cities with 8500+ hotels in its network today.
OYO hasn’t any more limited its services to India. The company has gone international, providing services in Malaysia, UAE, Nepal, Indonesia, and China. Its latest entry revealed Ritesh Agarwal a few months ago, and while he grabbed the award during the award function on Saturday.
Headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, OYO Rooms, in March 2015, received funding that amounted to $24 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks Capital, and DSG Consumer Partners investment firms.
India over the last two decades has witnessed a boom in the rise of startups across many sectors including healthcare, food, technology, education, etc. Every year many new startups are launched in India and surprisingly most of them have turned into multi-million dollar companies.
Pertinently, Rashmi Daga, a women entrepreneur who established FreshMenu, has got the ” ET-Facebook Woman Ahead Award ” whereas ” Midas Touch award ” was handed over to Subrata Mitra, a pioneer investor in India’s favorite online shopping portal Flipkart.