OYO Rooms enters Malaysia in overseas push

Branded hotels aggregator OYO Rooms has started operations in Malaysia, marking its first foray outside India.

Higher-than-average mobile penetration and a large internet population makes Malaysia an attractive market for OYO, Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO.

"OYO's model is suitable for markets with a large share of unbranded budget supply such as Southeast Asia, Africa and South America," he said.

OYO Rooms, run by Oravel Stays Pvt Ltd, operates in more than 160 Indian cities and has more than 40,000 rooms on its network. It competes with Zo Rooms, ZiP Rooms, Wudstay, Vista Rooms, QiK Rooms and other tech platforms for a slice of the growing budget hotels aggregation space. The company is all set to acquire Tiger Global-backed smaller rival Zo Rooms.

OYO is the most well-funded budget hotels aggregator in India. Last August, it raised $100 million (Rs 635 crore) in a fresh round of funding led by Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank. Earlier, it secured $24 million from investors led by Greenoaks Capital Partners.

In May 2014, the company raised $650,000 in funding from DSG Consumer Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The startup was incubated at VentureNursery, an angel-backed startup accelerator, in 2012. In October 2012, it received an undisclosed amount in seed funding from a group of investors including VentureNursery, Everest Flavours managing director Anand Ladsariya and Nirvana Venture Advisors co-founder Amit Patni.