Oyo at present is testing its newly developed service with limited number of hotels and will soon announce it
The new services is likely to bolster Oyo’s acquisition strategy
The development comes after Oyo announced hiring of more than 300 tech professionals
Hospitality unicorn and IPO bound-Oyo will be rolling out a self sign-up service for hotel owners to list their properties on Oyo. Oyo is currently testing the service with a limited number of hotel properties and is likely to launch it officially soon.
With this technology, a hotel owner can list their properties within 30 minutes of time as per Money Control. The move is likely to bolster Oyo’s acquisition strategy and is likely to help severely pandemic impacted small hotel and home-owners to generate more revenue, a person aware of the matter told Inc42.
The tech-enabled service seeks basic details from hotel owners such as room numbers, amenities, and multiple pictures of the rooms. The newly-built platform with the power of AI can self check the pictures, reject any images with any objectionable content and even automatically categorize images by detecting the elements in the image.
If a property is already listed in any of the other websites, then the platform will collect this information from these sites and auto-fill for Oyo on its own. Earlier last year, the startup launched customer contact-less check in through their smartphones to avoid spreading of the deadly virus.
Oyo declined to comment on the development.
It is worth noting that the development has come days after Ritesh Aggarwal led Oyo announced hiring of more than 300 technology professionals, including software developers, engineering and product managers, designers and data scientists across both entry level and senior level in the next six months. Oyo back then said that it wants to hire full-stack teams with key skill sets and expertise in the areas of machine learning, data engineering and information security, Android and iOS developers.
The new development also has emerged at a time when reports suggest that Oyo will be heading for an initial public offering. Oyo has also shortlisted investment banks JP Morgan, Kotak Mahindra Capital and Citi to manage its IPO. The company is expected to raise more than $1 Bn dollars when it lists on stock exchanges.
Oyo last week raised nearly $5 Mn from American tech giant Microsoft at valuation of $9.6 Bn The said investment was said to be the start of Oyo’s Series F2 round of investment. Earlier in July, the startup raised $660 Mn in term loan funding from global investors including Fidelity investment. The startup said that the offer was over scribed by 1.7 times and the company received commitments of close to $1 Bn institutional investors. The deal was upsized and increased by 10% to $660mn, the company said.
