Ritesh Agarwal, founder of Softbank-backed global hotel brand Oyo, has floated an early-stage venture capital fund by the name Aroa Ventures. This will focus on making value-add investments in the initial-stages of consumer, technology, and leisure infrastructure sector companies.
Aroa Ventures will invest in startups with annual revenues within the $500,000 to $1 million bracket. The Venture Capital fund’s website indicates that the Aroa Ventures will have an average deal size between $1 million to $10 million.
First reported by Entrackr, the publication says Aroa Ventures was registered in 2019 in Singapore, with Agarwal and Thomas Hufnagel as shareholders in the entity. Agarwal, however, owns 100% of Aroa Ventures.
“Beyond capital, our team of serial entrepreneurs and experienced professionals work alongside portfolio companies to accelerate their growth and to deliver better risk-adjusted returns," the Aroa Ventures website said.
The fund is headed by Gaurav Gulati, who was the co-founder and ex-COO of Innov8, which was acquired by Oyo.
Agarwal’s new VC fund comes almost a year after Agarwal increased his stakeholding in Oyo by setting up a fresh entity named RA Hospitality Holdings (Cayman). In July 2018, RA Hospitality received the competition commission (CCI) nod to merge with Oyo’s parent entities.
In October 2019, Oyo had raised $1.5 billion through RA Hospitality and Japan’s Softbank part of the hospitality startup’s Series F funding round.
With this, Agarwal will join a growing number of founder-turned-angel investors such as Sachin Bansal, Kunal Bahl, Kunal Shah, and Vijay Shekhar Sharma who have floated separate holding entities to invest and pick-up equity in startups.