Indian Hotel Disruptor Oyo has Acquired Shared Office Company Innov8, for US$30m.

Main Photo: An example of an Oyo hotel (in London)

Date: July 2019

Location: India initially

Name: Oyo Workspaces

No. of Keys: 20 locations at launch, growing to 50 by end 2019

Seller: Innov8, started by a similarly young (26 at the time) fellow-Indian, Ritesh Malik, who did the unimaginable by taking on a classified heritage building in Delhi’s Connaught Place (like London’s Mayfair) and turning it into co-working spaces. 

Buyer: Oyo will buy innovate for $30 million in an all-stock deal, to create Oyo Workspaces

Oyo will launch with more than 20 workspaces across India, and aims to have 50 locations open by the end of the year. The move puts it in competition with WeWork, which like Oyo is backed by investor Softbank.

Oyo’s move comes as fellow SoftBank-backed shared office space manager WeWork, part of The We Company, is gearing up for an IPO. Oyo Workspaces will directly compete with WeWork in India.

The brand will open over 21 of its shared work spaces in more than 10 cities across the country and it plans to expand presence to over 50 centres by the end of 2019, Oyo said in an emailed statement, without disclosing the deal value.

Gurugram-headquartered Oyo said it would offer three options of co-working real estate in the upper-mid scale, mid scale and economy categories.

OYO, which raised $1 billion last year from investors, including SoftBank and ride-hailing firm Grab, operates hotels in India, China, Britain, Dubai, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The company’s revenue jumped nearly three-fold in the last fiscal year, and it said it expects revenue to more than treble every year for the next five years, as it expands locally and in international markets.

New Delhi-based Innov8 offers upmarket shared workspaces, where a private office costs as high as 64,999 rupees ($947.24) a month, while a desk is sold for 9,999 rupees per month.

Price: US$30m

THPT Comment: One can’t help wonder how Oyo can cope with this very rapid expansion on hotels through so many continents and now workspaces…we know they are well-funded via Softbank, but do they have the management bandwidth?

First Seen: Reuters

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