Airbnb

Airbnb, Inc. operates an online marketplace where hosts list homes, rooms, experiences and services, and it charges a commission on each booking. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia started it in San Francisco in 2007 by renting air mattresses in their apartment during a design conference, and Nathan Blecharczyk joined as chief technology officer and third co-founder in February 2008. The site, then called AirBed & Breakfast, launched in August 2008, and the name was shortened to Airbnb in March 2009. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.

In January 2009 the founders joined Y Combinator, which invested $20,000 for a 6% stake. In April 2009 Sequoia Capital provided $600,000 in seed funding, and in November 2010 Greylock Partners and Sequoia invested $7.2 million in a Series A. In July 2011 Andreessen Horowitz, Digital Sky Technologies and General Catalyst invested $112 million. TPG invested $450 million in April 2014 at a $10 billion valuation, with additional funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia and Dragoneer Investment Group. In June 2015 General Atlantic, Hillhouse Capital, Tiger Management, Kleiner Perkins, GGV Capital and others invested $1.5 billion. Google Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures invested $555.5 million in September 2016 at a $30 billion valuation, and a $1 billion raise in March 2017 valued Airbnb at $31 billion and brought total funding above $3 billion. In April 2020, with travel collapsing, Silver Lake and Sixth Street bought $1 billion of equity at an $18 billion valuation and lent $1 billion more.

Airbnb went public on December 10, 2020, pricing 51.3 million Class A shares at $68 on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ABNB, raising about $3.5 billion. In the prospectus, Sequoia entities held 16.5% of Class B shares, Founders Fund entities 5.4% and DST Global entities 2.3%. Revenue was $4.81 billion in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, and the company's 2025 annual report shows revenue of $12.24 billion, up from $11.10 billion in 2024.

Airbnb shows the return available to the earliest backers of a marketplace. Sequoia's 2009 seed shares were sold at $0.01 each and its Series A shares at $0.21 split adjusted, against a $68 IPO price roughly eleven years later. The 2020 Silver Lake and Sixth Street financing, priced at a steep discount to the 2017 valuation, also shows how structured late-stage capital can carry a company through a revenue shock to a public listing within the same year.