Abhishek Securities

  Lightspeed Venture  Partners, a backer of  Oyo Rooms  and  Grab Holdings Inc. , is poised to step up investments in Southeast Asian startups, using part of the $4 billion the global venture capital firm raised earlier this year. The Menlo Park, California-based firm has recently established a new regional office in Singapore with a local team, according to Akshay Bhushan, a partner at Lightspeed who was previously a founding member of  Flipkart ’s corporate development team. It plans to focus on Singapore and Indonesia, he said. Lightspeed is joining other U.S. investors including Vulcan Capital in boosting their investments in Southeast Asia. With deepening mobile penetration and an emergent middle class, the region has given birth to tech giants such as Grab,  Gojek  and  Tokopedia  in the past decade. “We are excited to see the first generation of high value companies that have come out of Singapore and Indonesia,” Bhushan sai...

  The Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI) has come out in support of Chandigarh-based hotelier, Vikas Gupta who has lodged a first information report (FIR) against Ritesh Agarwal, founder of Oyo. In the FIR, the hotelier has stated that the Oyo’s top management abruptly exited a business agreement with "criminal intent". According to FHRAI close to 100 hoteliers have encountered similar conduct from Oyo as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic hit businesses. “Disruptions caused by the pandemic have affected businesses everywhere, but Oyo now has resorted to manipulating agreements to coerce hoteliers out of it. It is evident in Vikas Gupta’s case Oyo could not keep its commitment in the agreement. So instead of trying to work a way out, it just tried to use brute force to abandon the hotelier. Not only did Oyo decide to abandon a business going through its worst phase, it further tried to intimidate the hotelier with penalties running into crores,” said ...

  Two top-level executives have quit  Oyo Hotels  & Homes even as the hospitality chain extended mandatory leave of a chunk of its employees by six months and offered them voluntary separation amid the Covid-19 crisis. Gaurav Ajmera, global head of revenue management, and Burhanuddin Pithawala, global head of marketing and growth, have quit,  Oyo  said in an internal note to employees on Friday. The company has promoted Anuj Tejpal as its global chief commercial officer to head revenue (including OTA), marketing and growth. Tejpal was previously global business development leader. Chandan Agarwal, who was managing Oyo's  cloud kitchen  business, had also left earlier, people close to the development said. An Oyo spokesperson confirmed this to ET. In a separate blog post, the company said employees on leave with limited benefits plan in India can now either choose to opt for a voluntary separation programme (VSP) or continue with the existin...