After two failed attempts, a valuation that collapsed from a $10 billion peak and back up again, a decade-long court battle with a rival, and profits that need a footnote to understand — OYO is finally trying to go public, and the story is more complicated than the headline numbers suggest.
In 2021, when a 27-year-old Ritesh Agarwal filed papers to take OYO public at a targeted valuation of $12 billion, it felt like the apotheosis of the Indian startup decade. A kid from Odisha who had dropped out of college to sleep in his own budget hotel rooms had turned that obsession into one of the world's largest hospitality chains. SEBI pushed back. The market turned. By August 2024, OYO raised emergency capital at a valuation of roughly $2.4 billion — worth less, as TechCrunch pointed out at the time, than the $3.3 billion the company had raised in total. That wasn't a down round. That was a reckoning.
On June 30, 2026, PRISM — the holding company that sits above the OYO brand — filed its Updated Draft Red Herring Prospectus with SEBI. The regulator had cleared it earlier in June. The ask: ₹6,650 crore, at a hoped-for valuation of $7 to $8 billion. The listing entity isn't even called OYO anymore.
So: is this genuinely a new company, or is it the same story with better packaging? The answer, as usual, is somewhere in between — and the details matter.
The first attempt came in 2021, when OYO filed directly for a ₹8,430 crore issue at a targeted valuation of $12 billion. SEBI returned the draft papers with queries. The company resubmitted in 2023, got further into the process, then withdrew in 2024 amid sustained market volatility and subdued startup investor sentiment.
What's structurally different this time is worth unpacking. OYO's parent, Oravel Stays, rebranded to PRISM ahead of the IPO to reflect its global aspirations. It is now filing as the global parent entity — bringing in Motel 6, European homes brands, and co-working assets — not as the India-only hotel aggregator it was in 2021. It used the confidential pre-filing route, which allowed two years of SEBI engagement before any public disclosure. And it has 12 consecutive quarters of EBITDA profitability behind it — something it absolutely did not have in 2021.
Note on nomenclature: PRISM is the commercial brand name. The legal entity filing with SEBI remains Oravel Stays Limited. Customers will keep booking rooms under the OYO name. The rebrand is about corporate identity and investor signalling, not operations.
There's also a governance signal worth reading carefully. The appointment of former SEBI Chairman Ajay Tyagi as an independent director signals significantly improved corporate governance standards versus 2021, when the company faced scrutiny around related-party transactions and revenue recognition. That appointment, coming just weeks before SEBI's clearance, is not coincidental.
The IPO will be a 100% book-built issue, comprising only a fresh issue of equity shares aggregating up to ₹6,650 crore. The IPO does not include an Offer for Sale (OFS) — meaning existing shareholders will not dilute their stakes through the public issue. Existing investors, including SoftBank's SVF India Holdings, Ritesh Agarwal, Microsoft, Airbnb, Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners, Khazanah Nasional, and Greenoaks Capital, are not selling shares and will continue to hold their respective stakes after the IPO.
This sounds investor-friendly at first — but it cuts both ways. Unlike several recent technology IPOs, PRISM's public issue is structured entirely as a fresh issue, allowing all proceeds to flow into the company instead of providing exits to existing investors. That's genuinely different. The flip side: the big holders who've ridden this from the $10 billion peak, through the $2.4 billion trough, are choosing not to cash out at $7–8 billion. That can mean they believe in the upside. It can also mean selling at this price would rattle the book. Reasonable people disagree.
SoftBank remains the largest stakeholder with a 40.04% stake, while founder Ritesh Agarwal's holding company RA Hospitality Holdings has a 20.12% stake, with Agarwal directly holding an additional 6.59%.
The company may also consider a pre-IPO placement of up to ₹1,330 crore before filing the Red Herring Prospectus with the Registrar of Companies. If completed, the amount raised through the pre-IPO round will be deducted from the size of the fresh issue.
This is the part that deserves the most attention. According to the updated draft prospectus, the company plans to utilise ₹4,987.5 crore from the IPO proceeds to repay or prepay outstanding borrowings, while the remaining funds will be used for general corporate purposes.
In plain terms: out of every ₹100 raised in this IPO, roughly ₹75 goes straight to banks and bondholders, not to building new hotels, hiring engineers, or entering new markets. The reason is sitting on the balance sheet: as of December 31, 2025, the company had total borrowings of ₹7,485 crore.
This is a debt-rescue IPO as much as a growth IPO. That's not inherently bad — lower interest costs will directly improve future profitability — but investors should be clear about what their capital is actually funding. The roughly ₹1,660 crore left for "general corporate purposes" is the actual growth capital; everything else is financial housekeeping.
PRISM's headline numbers are genuinely impressive in isolation.
PRISM reported strong financial performance during the first nine months of FY26. Revenue from operations increased to ₹6,941 crore from ₹6,259 crore in FY25, while profit after tax surged to ₹748 crore compared with ₹245 crore in the previous fiscal year. EBITDA more than doubled to ₹2,127 crore from ₹953 crore a year earlier.
These are real improvements. But investors owe it to themselves to read the next sentence carefully.
The company received a deferred tax credit of ₹559.3 crore during the period under review and incurred a tax expense of ₹56.2 crore.
A deferred tax credit — technically a Deferred Tax Asset (DTA) recognition — works like this: when a company has accumulated losses from prior years, it builds up a pool of theoretical future tax savings. Accounting standards (India's Ind AS 12) allow it to recognise some of those savings as an asset today, which flows through the profit-and-loss statement as income. It is perfectly legal. It is also non-cash and non-operational. It doesn't represent money coming in from a hotel booking.
For full-year FY25, a similar dynamic was at play: the net profit was achieved after ₹767.5 crore in deferred tax credits and exceptional gains, and the underlying pre-tax position was a loss of ₹489.3 crore. The 9MFY26 deferred tax credit of ₹559.3 crore means the same dynamic continued into the current period — the headline PAT flatters the underlying cash position.
This does not make PRISM uninvestable. Founder Ritesh Agarwal said in December last year that the company was expected to close FY26 with a profit of ₹1,100 crore. And EBITDA — which doesn't get flattered by tax credits — is the cleaner indicator to track. EBITDA excluding exceptional items, share-based payment expense and other income stood at ₹1,968 crore for 9M FY26, 80% higher than the full FY25 figure of ₹1,095 crore. That trajectory is real.
The bottom line: the business is on a genuine upswing. But the "profitable company" headline requires a footnote that most press releases skipped.
The more interesting transformation is in what OYO is actually doing with its hotels — especially in India.
The original OYO model was asset-light aggregation: sign up budget hotel owners, put the OYO brand on the signboard, provide a tech stack and booking engine, and take a revenue share. Quick to scale, hard to control. Hotel owners famously revolted. Quality was inconsistent. The brand got battered.
The newer model — company-serviced hotels — is a different animal. Under this approach, OYO directly manages operations, sets quality standards, and takes genuine control over the guest experience. These hotels operate under premium and mid-premium brands: Townhouse, Capital O, Palette, and Sunday (which targets four- and five-star positioning).
Within India, PRISM has continued to scale its company-serviced hotel business. The number of company-operated hotel storefronts increased to 1,573 by the end of December 2025 from 1,053 at the end of March 2025. During the first nine months of FY26, this business generated a gross booking value of ₹1,346.45 crore, compared with ₹818.23 crore in FY25. Company-serviced hotel storefronts now contribute nearly half of the company's domestic gross booking value.
Why does this matter beyond optics? Higher operational control means better quality consistency, which drives higher occupancy and better RevPAR — Revenue Per Available Room, the standard industry metric for how efficiently a hotel fills its rooms. Better RevPAR means better unit economics, which is what OYO has always struggled to prove.
PRISM operates 43 brands across more than 35 countries. As of December 31, 2025, its network comprised 24,303 hotels, 124,668 homes and 144,583 listings, including 14,937 storefronts in India.
The global picture adds another dimension entirely. The shift became larger after Oravel Stays completed the $525 million acquisition of G6 Hospitality from Blackstone in December 2024. The deal added Motel 6 and Studio 6 to the platform and gave PRISM a deeper US lodging base before the IPO filing. The company's revenue mix has shifted sharply towards international markets. About 84% of revenue from operations now comes from outside India. The United States accounted for around 27% of revenue during the first nine months of FY26, while Europe contributed another 24%.
India — the birthplace of the whole enterprise — generated a gross booking value of roughly ₹2,732 crore during 9MFY26, accounting for about 12% of OYO's global GBV. In the US, the company's GBV stood at ₹12,022 crore during 9M FY26, up 155% from ₹4,712 crore reported in all of FY25. The US contributed 52.4% of PRISM's global GBV during the nine-month period.
This is a company that has dramatically reweighted away from its home market. The G6 Hospitality acquisition adds high-margin US franchise royalty income — structurally more predictable than India's commission-based aggregation business. It makes PRISM a genuinely global hospitality entity. Whether that's a strength or a complexity risk is a question we'll return to.
No OYO IPO story is complete without the Zostel chapter — a decade-long legal saga that reads more like a startup thriller than a corporate filing.
The dispute dates back to 2015, when OYO, Zostel, and Zostel's key shareholders — Tiger Global and Orios Venture Partners — signed a non-binding term sheet for the proposed acquisition of Zostel's hotel business. In return, Zostel's shareholders were to receive up to a 7% equity stake in OYO. However, the deal never materialised.
OYO claimed the deal fell through because it could not identify sufficient value in the business. At the time, OYO alleged that Zostel misled it on revenue, while Zostel claimed OYO stole confidential data while auditing it.
In January 2018, Zostel invoked the arbitration clause, seeking specific performance of the non-binding term sheet and the transfer of a 7% stake in OYO. In March 2021, the arbitrator ruled that the term sheet was binding and that Zostel was entitled to specific performance and execution of definitive agreements.
OYO challenged the award. In May 2025, the Delhi High Court set aside the arbitral award in the Zostel dispute, ruling that granting specific performance in the absence of agreement on material terms conflicted with the public policy of India. In July 2025, the Supreme Court dismissed Zostel's petition challenging the Delhi High Court's ruling while allowing the company to approach the appropriate forum to pursue available remedies.
But the story doesn't end there. Following the High Court's decision, Zostel filed an appeal under Section 37 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 before a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court. The matter remains pending. The matter is next listed for hearing on July 8, 2026, according to OYO's IPO filing.
The stakes? If Zostel ultimately succeeds through a non-appealable court order, the company could be directed to issue or transfer up to 7% of its shareholding, or pay an equivalent monetary value, in accordance with the court's directions. At a $7–8 billion valuation, 7% is worth roughly ₹4,000–5,000 crore — real money, and material dilution for all existing shareholders. PRISM has warned in the DRHP that any adverse outcome in the legal proceedings involving Zostel may materially and adversely affect its business, reputation, prospects, results of operations and financial condition.
This is the one risk factor almost entirely outside management's control, and the one most often underweighted in the IPO excitement.
The most uncomfortable number in this IPO story is simple: OYO was once targeting a $12 billion valuation. It is now targeting $7–8 billion. That is a 35–40% haircut from the IPO-ask peak, even after five years of operating improvements. And the company's actual private-market peak was ~$10 billion — from which the $7–8 billion ask still represents a meaningful discount.
At $7–8 billion on PRISM's FY25 revenue base, the price-to-sales multiple is approximately 7–8x trailing revenue — still premium, but within the range of comparable global hospitality-tech platforms. Against FY25 EBITDA, the EV/EBITDA multiple is approximately 53x. Against Moody's FY26 EBITDA projection of ₹2,496 crore (~$300 million), the forward EV/EBITDA drops to approximately 23x.
Globally, traditional hospitality businesses trade at 10–15x EBITDA. Even at 23x forward EBITDA, PRISM is asking for a premium that implies significant faith in the G6 Hospitality integration, the India premium pivot, and the durability of its profit improvement. Reports peg the IPO at roughly 25–30 times EBITDA. That gap will not be ignored by institutional investors.
The pre-IPO grey market hasn't been especially enthusiastic either — a muted signal that the "profitability turnaround" story hasn't yet fully translated into retail excitement at the expected valuation.
Fair is fair. There are genuine reasons this third attempt is more credible than the first two.
The financial trajectory is real. PRISM reported a profit after tax of ₹748 crore in the first nine months of FY26 — almost 3x the ₹245 crore profit it reported in all of FY25. Its operating revenue stood at ₹6,941 crore in 9M FY26, already above the full-year FY25 figure of ₹6,253 crore. The direction of travel — from a ₹1,286 crore loss in FY23 to a trending ₹1,000+ crore profit — is structurally significant, not a one-quarter blip.
The business mix is genuinely more resilient. The G6 Hospitality acquisition gives PRISM a meaningful international revenue base through the Motel 6 and Studio 6 chains in the United States, addressing investor concerns about OYO's heavy dependence on the Indian mid-market hotel segment. US hospitality franchise royalty income has more predictable cash flows than aggregation commissions.
The company-serviced pivot addresses the core flaw. Better quality control, higher occupancy, better guest ratings — this is a defensible competitive advantage that the old franchise-only model never built. Direct channels accounted for 67.6% of stays, backed by a combined loyalty base of 26.4 million members across OYO Wizard and My6. That's a stickiness metric that matters.
Debt repayment will improve unit economics directly. Paying down ₹4,987.5 crore of the ₹7,485 crore debt burden will meaningfully reduce the finance costs that currently weigh on the P&L — freeing up cash that can flow to operations rather than lenders.
OYO's IPO is, at its core, a story about whether a company built for a zero-interest-rate, hypergrowth world can survive — and thrive — in the one that replaced it.
The answer so far is: surprisingly yes, but with caveats. The real operating business — hotel aggregation, premium serviced rooms, US franchise royalties — is in better shape than at any point in the company's history. The EBITDA improvement is not cosmetic. The global footprint is real.
But three questions will define what this IPO is actually worth. One: when the deferred tax tailwind fades, can the core business sustain ₹1,000+ crore in clean, cash-backed profit? Two: can the India premium pivot deliver the margin improvement it promises, or will it face the same quality-control challenges that damaged the franchise era? And three: what does the Delhi High Court's Division Bench decide about that 7% stake claim — and when?
The most ironic thing about this IPO: a company that built its reputation on making budget accommodation discoverable and affordable is going public partly on the strength of Motel 6 royalties from American road trips. The budget-hotel aggregator is listing as a global hospitality conglomerate. Whether that's genuine evolution or very expensive rebranding — public markets will now get to decide.