“Community marketplace for unique spaces” Airbnb announced today that it has received $112 million in Series b financing from Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst.
When you add that to their previous funding, Airbnb now boasts total funding of $119.8 million. According to them, this new funding will be used to “fuel growth, accelerate the hiring of a world-class team and strengthen the Airbnb community at the local level.” Read: expansion.
Airbnb is a startup that allows people to forgo traditional lodging and stay in privately listed locations when they are traveling. People who want to rent out their properties can list them through the site and once a renter shows interest, the host has total control over whether or not they allow the prospective renters in their space.
According to Tech Crunch, the split looks like $60 million from Andreessen Horowitz, $40 million from DST Global and $5 million from General Catalyst.
Airbnb’s valuation reportedly sits at $1.3 billion.
“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,” said Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. “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.”
Here are some stats that Airbnb dropped today –
- 2 million nights booked, doubling from 1 million just 4 months ago
- Their site receives over 30 million page views a month
- Since May, their number of Social Connections has tripled to 54 million
Airbnb is in over 16,000 cities in 186 countries.
“We’re thrilled to have led this investment round in Airbnb. The company is defining a completely new category in e-commerce – a marketplace for all kinds of spaces, from homes and apartments to tree houses and yachts,” said Jeff Jordan, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz. “Airbnb’s explosive growth and passionate community of users reinforce the uniqueness of what they’re doing, and in the same way eBay redefined online shopping, Airbnb is redefining the way the world thinks about accommodations.”
In May, Ashton Kutcher announced that he had invested in the company. Airbnb said that he had also joined as a “strategic adviser.”