Two Indians including Oravel founder Ritesh Agarwal win Thiel Fellowship

Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of Oravel Stays Pvt Ltd, and Diwank Singh Tomar, a techie who has shifted base sometime back to the US, have won 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship for 2013. The fellowship, which picks 20 individuals who are aged under 20, provides $100,000 each to the selected ones besides mentorship from a host of entrepreneurs, investors and thought leaders including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Napster founder Sean Parker and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk.

Thiel is also one of the first outside investors in social networking giant Facebook.

This is the third edition of the fellowship. In 2012 three of Indian origin were part of the fellowship.

Agarwal and Tomar are the only Indian-born entrepreneurs to win the fellowship this year.

Agarwal launched Oravel.com, which aggregates bed-and-breakfast establishments, private rooms, and serviced apartments for short and mid-term rental, when he was just 18. Last October, the firm raised an undisclosed seed funding from a bunch of investors, including startup accelerator VentureNursery.

Tomar dropped out of his college in India and moved to Silicon Valley to work with an online platform. He had earlier bagged Mozilla WebFWD fellowship for his work related to improving learning online. Currently Tomar is working on a collaborative learning platform.