Ritesh Agarwal: Who He Is & His Full Life Journey

Ritesh Agarwal was born on 16 November 1993 in Bissam Cuttack, a small town in Odisha, into a Marwari family that ran a modest shop in nearby Rayagada. He grew up largely in Titilagarh, attending Sacred Heart School before moving on to St. John’s Senior Secondary School. Long before “startup founder” was something he’d call himself, he was the kid who taught himself to code and, by his early teens, was already selling SIM cards on the side — small, scrappy hustle that hinted at what was coming.

At 17, Ritesh moved to Delhi for college, following the fairly conventional script of an ambitious Indian teenager. It didn’t last. He dropped out within a year, drawn instead to travelling the country on a tight budget and meeting people building things. Those trips were less about sightseeing and more about noticing — specifically, noticing how unreliable budget hotel rooms were, no matter which city he was in.

In 2012, Ritesh launched Oravel Stays — a listings site for budget rooms and homestays, built with the idea that travellers just needed a better way to discover cheap places to stay. It got him into the Venture Nursery accelerator and his first outside funding. But Oravel had a gap: it could help someone find a listing, not guarantee what they’d get once they arrived. That gap became the whole idea for what came next.

2013 changed everything. Ritesh became the first person from Asia to win a Thiel Fellowship — a $100,000 grant handed out by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to young people willing to skip conventional paths and build instead. With that money and a sharper idea, he rebuilt Oravel into something new: OYO Rooms, launched in May 2013, built around the promise of standardized rooms at a fixed price, not just listings.

OYO’s next few years were a blur of funding rounds — Lightspeed, Sequoia, and eventually SoftBank in a much bigger way — and expansion into China, the UK, the UAE, and Southeast Asia. By 2018, the company had raised over a billion dollars and crossed unicorn status; by mid-2019, Ritesh personally tripled his stake with a $2 billion share purchase, pushing OYO’s valuation past $10 billion.

The growth wasn’t without controversy. Around this period, OYO’s own co-founder, Manish Sinha, publicly accused Ritesh of misappropriating funds owed to a hotel partner — allegations the company denied in full. It was an early, uncomfortable reminder that scaling fast doesn’t mean scaling clean.

Global travel stopped almost overnight in 2020, and a business built entirely on hotel occupancy took the hit directly. OYO’s valuation was marked down sharply, layoffs followed, and a planned IPO filed in 2021 was shelved indefinitely. For a founder who had spent his twenties being asked how fast he could grow, the pandemic forced a different, harder question: could the business survive at all?

Away from boardrooms, 2023 brought a personal milestone: Ritesh married Geetansha Sood, from Lucknow, in a wedding attended by high-profile names from the startup and investing world. The same year, he joined Shark Tank India as its youngest-ever panellist, putting him on the other side of the table — evaluating the same kind of rough, early-stage pitches he himself had once made. Through the show, he personally backed several young ventures, including BrownDoor.ai, First Bud Organics, Rocca, Coratia Technologies, WhySoBlue, Katidhan, Toffee Coffee Roasters, and Daak Room.

OYO’s comeback wasn’t loud. The company exited over 150,000 underperforming hotel rooms, pulled out of loss-heavy markets like China, and leaned into India, Southeast Asia, Europe’s home-rental market, and — through the acquisition of G6 Hospitality — the United States, where it now runs the Motel 6 and Studio 6 brands. In May 2024, OYO posted its first-ever annual profit: ₹229 crore for FY24, backed by eight straight quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA.

Somewhere in that rebuild, the parent company rebranded from Oravel Stays to PRISM — a name meant to reflect a business that now spans hotels, homes, and extended stays, not just the budget rooms it started with. By late 2025 and into 2026, PRISM had secured shareholder approval and regulatory clearance for a ₹6,650 crore IPO, one of the most closely watched Indian startup listings of the year.