SoftBank Slashes Oyo’s Valuation By More Than 20%

India-based hotel booking platform Oyo has become the latest high-flying startup to see its valuation significantly cut as prices on big-name tech firms continue to drop.

SoftBank Group cut the valuation of Oyo to $2.7 billion in the June quarter from an earlier $3.4 billion. This is all just months before the company is set to go public, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

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In 2019, Oyo was valued at $10 billion. The travel tech company, founded in 2012, has raised $4 billion in funding—including a $660 million venture debt round in July of last year—according to Crunchbase data.

Oyo is expecting approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India to go public early next year and is aiming for a $5 billion valuation, the report said.

Valuation cuts

Oyo becomes the latest startup to see investors slice its valuation this year. Perhaps most notably, in March delivery company Instacart slashed its valuation by nearly 40%—bringing its valuation to $24 billion, down from the $39 billion price tag the company saw in 2021.

That cut may not have been enough. As Bloomberg reported in July, mutual fund investors had marked down the price to as low as $14.7 billion.

Instacart also is looking to go public.

In July, buy now, pay later giant Klarna raised $800 million in a new round of funding that valued the company at $6.7 billion—an 85% drop from its previous $46 billion valuation.

SoftBank’s woes

The mark-down in valuation is just the latest hit to Japanese investing giant SoftBank.

In August, the company reported the SoftBank Vision Fund 1 posted a realized net loss of $22.7 billion, as many of its holdings, including Uber and DoorDash, suffered quarter-to-quarter declines on public markets.

SoftBank also said its newer Vision Fund 2 took a hit as “the fair value of many privately invested companies has decreased due to the decline in stock valuations.”

SoftBank is an investor in Klarna.