Gurgaon: OYO Rooms, which is an online hotel booking portal and Grofers, a Gurgaon-based hyper-local delivery company, are among 50 companies that may be the next start-up unicorns, according to research carried out by CB Insights for The New York Times.
The report said there are currently 131 startups globally which are currently valued at $1 billion, also known as startup unicorns.
Among the Indian firms who’ve reached this stage includes e-commerce marketplaces Flipkart and Snapdeal, mobile commerce and digital payment processor Paytm, taxi aggregator Ola, online restaurant guide Zomato, mobile advertising firm InMobi, domestic handset maker Micromax and Big Data & analytics solution provider Mu Sigma.
Quikr too is on the verge of getting in to that list, with its investor valuing it already at $900 million.
The CB Insights’ Next-50 Unicorns list, was built upon by the research firm by running a data screen and factoring in the amount of funding raised, employee turnover and social media mentions.
“The exact valuations of the companies are hard to pin down because the start-ups are private and are not required to disclose their finances, but CB Insights determined that they might be on a path toward a $1 billion value through an algorithm that analysed factors including amount of financing raised, employee turnover and social media mentions,” the New York Times article said.
Grofers, started by Albinder Dhindsa and Saurabh Kumar in 2013, allows customers to place an order through a mobile app and receive delivery of food, groceries, toiletries and other items within 90 minutes.
The service is headquartered in Gurgaon, and has raised close to $45 million in 3 rounds, with the most recent one getting it $36 million from two of the biggest investors into Indian startups — Tiger Global and Sequoia.
Oyo Rooms, which is the newest of them all, is the one to watch out though. OYO Rooms which started life as an Airbnb clone called Oravel in 2012, pivoted to its current budget hotel aggregator model in June last year.
Oyo raised $100 million investment led by SoftBank earlier this month, just about five months after securing Rs 125 crore from San Francisco-based Greenoaks Capital and existing investors.
Oyo has presence in more than 90 cities including Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad.