Oyo Hotels & Homes, India’s biggest hospitality chain, headquartered in Gurugram, is eyeing to infuse around $300 million into the US market after aggressively covering the Indian and the Chinese field, respectively. The prime aim of the hotel giant to foray into the western market is, to expand its presence in the US market which has a lot of potential in the hospitality sector.
The company, which opened its maiden US hotel at the beginning of 2019, has plans to invest $300 million to expand in the country, said sources.
Although, Oyo already operates more than 50 properties across US cities including Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Miami.
The company will use those funds to build out technology, design and operating teams and renovate properties. It’s adding hotels at the pace of one a day, and aims to expand its US offerings at five times that rate by the end of 2019.
“So far we’ve been very focused on, build a good product and price it very effectively for the consumer. We want to make sure that we do it right rather than just do it fast. If that means three a day and not five a day, life goes on,” Ritesh Agarwal, chief executive officer, Oyo said.
The SoftBank backed hospitality chain Oyo was started by Agarwal in 2013. The startup was started from a single hotel to over 8500 hotels at present. It is the fastest growing network of hotels, offline and online and the current evaluation is over $400 million.
At present, the company operates more than 23,000 properties with more than 850,000 rooms, making it the world’s sixth-largest lodging provider by its own measure.
The company’s growing revenue and popularity has attracted plenty of venture capital, including a $1 billion funding round in 2018 from various investors including SoftBank, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Ventures.
Oyo competes with the likes of Days Inn by Wyndham and Tru by Hilton.