OYO's Ritesh Agarwal touches the feet of Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son

Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, attended the wedding reception of Ritesh Agarwal and Geetansha Sood. (Image credit: @weddingz.in/Instagram)

SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son on Tuesday attended the wedding reception of Ritesh Agarwal, where the young entrepreneur and his wife bent down to touch the Japanese billionaire’s feet and seek his blessings.

Ritesh Agarwal, 29, married Geetansha Sood earlier this month. The couple hosted a wedding reception at the five-star Taj Palace hotel in Delhi on March 7, which was attended by the who’s who of the startup ecosystem. But it was the presence of Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son that grabbed maximum eyeballs.

Son’s SoftBank is the biggest investor in hospitality chain OYO, which Agarwal launched in 2013. Masayoshi Son himself has been something of a mentor to Agarwal for almost a decade, even providing a personal guarantee to his $2 billion loan which allowed the 29-year-old to increase his stake in OYO in 2019.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Weddingz.in (@weddingz.in)

Born to a Marwari family in Odisha, Agarwal moved to Delhi in 2011 for college. He dropped out of college after two years and was accepted into the Thiel Fellowship program. As one of the winners of the Fellowship, he received a grant of $100,000 which was used to launch OYO in May 2013.

Reports suggested that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son flew in via private jet to attend Agarwal’s wedding. Son is also expected to meet founders of SoftBank portfolio companies, both public and private, during his trip to Delhi.

The Japanese tech conglomerate has invested around $15 billion in Indian companies so far, of which $11 billion have been in the last six years. Its portfolio in the country has 28 companies including the likes of PolicyBazaar, Delhivery, Swiggy, Meesho, OYO, FirstCry, OfBusiness and Unacademy, and Paytm (whose founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma attended Agarwal’s reception) among others.