Indian hospitality chain Oyo Hotels which is soaring high with success these days has planned to secured funds amounting to $1 billion for the purpose of expansion into China and other global regions. This round is expected to be led by existing investors including SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The existing investors have currently put in $800 million, with commitments for another $200 million. About $600 million of the total will be deployed into China where Oyo had forayed just 10 months back.
“With this additional funding, we plan to rapidly scale our business in these countries, while continuing to invest further in technology and talent,” Agarwal stated. “We will also deploy fresh capital to take our unique model that enables small hotel owners to create quality living spaces, global.”
This particular funding round will value the startup at around $5 billion. The hotel chain was founded by a 24-year-old college dropout named Ritesh Agarwal. In the past two years, Oyo has expanded beyond India into China, Malaysia, Nepal and Britain.
Achieving the $5 billion valuation mark, Oyo will become India’s most-valuable startup after One97 Communications which is the parent company of digital payments giant Paytm.
Oyo started with one hotel in Gurgaon and has grown to 125,000 rooms in India. In China, where it began operations last November, it has expanded to 171 cities with 87,000 rooms. It is now in over 350 cities with 211,000 rooms.
In the past few months, Oyo has expanded to various countries and is trying to make hotels easier to find through its site and more predictable as well. With time, the hospitality chain has become the most popular budget chain in the country.