Oyo Rooms founder Ritesh Agarwal has set up a firm, called Aroa Ventures, to invest in early-stage startups. Aroa ventures will look to invest in startups with annual revenues of $500,000 to $1 million.

Former chief operating officer of co-working space Innov8, Gaurav Gulati, will head Aroa Ventures. Oyo had acquired Innov8 for $31 million last year in March.

Aroa Ventures was registered with Agarwal and Thomas Hufnagel the through RACo Holding Company in 2019, as stated by Entrackr. However, Agarwal got complete control after taking 100 per cent stake in RACo Holding.

The new Venture Capitalist fund has come almost a year after Agarwal increased his stakeholding in Oyo by setting up a fresh entity named RA Hospitality Holdings (Cayman). In July 2018, RA Hospitality received the competition commission (CCI) nod to merge with Oyo.

Last year, Oyo raised $1.5 billion through RA Hospitality and Softbank as part of the hospitality startup's Series F funding round.

With this, Agarwal has joined the list of entrepreneurs who turned angel investors such as Sachin Bansal, Kunal Bahl, Kunal Shah, and Vijay Shekhar Sharma. All of them have investment entities for personal investments.

Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal set up an investment vehicle Titan Capital last year, which claims to have invested in 70 startups. Sandeep Tandon and Kunal Shah have also set up Whiteboard Capital following the exit from payment platform Freecharge.

This year, in July, Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma set up two new entities-VSS Investco and VSS Holdings.