Airbnb just joined the billion dollar valuation club, $1.3 billion to be precise, according to the Wall Street Journal. The San Francisco-based apartment-sharing website just closed a $112 million round of financing led by Andreessen-Horowitz, with participation from Yuri Milner’s DST Global and General Catalyst.
The startup, launched in August 2008 by cofounders Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, today boasts some impressive stats: more than 2 million nights booked (double that of four months ago), a website attracting 30 million-plus monthly views, and 54 million ‘social connections’ since the May launch of its social hub.
As competition in its category heats up, Airbnb will reportedly use the latest cash infusion to continue expansion from its current 186 countries and “stay in front of the folks trying to emulate the service around the world.”
The company is certainly the darling of VC firms. As Forbes notes, Andreessen-Horowitz Jeff Jordan wrote in a blog post,
“I joined eBay in 1999, early in its life, and had the privilege of witnessing and contributing to the development of one of the most iconic e-commerce businesses. Airbnb reminds me more of eBay in its early days than any other business I have ever encountered."
His reasoning? Both eBay and Airbnb are, in Jordan's opinion:
• Marketplace models, connecting buyers and sellers
• Community-driven, populated with passionate users who evangelize the service
• Providing economic opportunity and empowerment to their sellers/hosts, enabling them to earn meaningful income
• Platforms upon which their community of users continually expands into new verticals
• Helping to make inefficient commerce efficient.
According to TechCrunch, Andreessen invested $60 million, DST $40 million, $5 million came from General Catalyst, and the remainder from previous investors and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
“Over the past three years, we’ve built a community marketplace for unique properties and brought it into the mainstream and into almost every country on the planet,” stated Airbnb's Chesky.
“Today is a watershed moment — both for Airbnb as a company and for our community — that will enable us to touch new markets and expand our vision to make the world’s most interesting and inspiring places accessible to our users.”
We first covered Airbnb as a disruptive peer-to-peer brand last June, when Jordan commented said that he and the company's cofounders “believe Airbnb is to spaces what eBay is to products.”
Still, its rapid rise hasn't been without controversy. The site has been accused of running "dummy ads" on Craigslist, a practice that an Airbnb spokesman told Fortune was the result of contracted sales reps, adding: "This is not a tactic we condone or endorse, and it is our policy to forbid such actions."
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