Ritesh Agarwal

About

Ritesh Agarwal’s entrepreneurial journey has paralleled the growth of India’s startup ecosystem. In the early 2010s, he embarked on a solo trip across India on a shoestring budget, staying in small hotels, guest houses, and B&Bs. That experience led him to found OYO in 2012 to bring standardisation and technology to India’s fragmented budget hospitality sector. Through PRISM, OYO’s parent company, Agarwal has built one of the world's largest hospitality tech platforms, spanning hotels, vacation homes and urban rentals across more than 35 countries. As of December 2025, PRISM operates over 293,000 storefronts, including 24,303 hotels, 124,668 vacation homes, and 144,583 listings, under a portfolio of more than 40 brands, serving over 119 million unique customers. For Agarwal, however, the story has never been about scale alone. “We have rebuilt ourselves many times over to become one of the world’s most vertically integrated hospitality tech platforms,” he says. “Each reinvention taught me the same lesson: scale is what the world sees, but transformation is the real work. The willingness to change everything except why we exist is the reason we are still growing 13 years on, and the reason our best chapter is still unwritten.” That willingness to reinvent the business is evident across its global operations. Across markets, technology developed in India powers revenue management, pricing, operations, customer experience and direct distribution, with more than 83% of the company's revenue now coming from outside India.