AirBnB gets $112 million in new investment

AirBnB, a San Francisco-based person-to-person room,apartment and house rentalstartup has raised $112 million in Series B funding from a group of investors including Russian Internet investor DST Global, General Catalyst andAndreessenHorowitz. Though three years old, the company has raised about $120 million.AirBnBAndreessenHorowitz partner Jeff Jordan who till recently was the chief executive officer of Open Table led the investment on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz.

Frankly, todays new announcement is just an affirmation of what has been reported in the past, ad nauseam.Sarah Lacy of Techcrunch had first reported of the likely investment on May 30, 2011 and speculated that the company was valued at close to a billion dollars. We have heard similar valuation metrics as well.As we previously reported, the company is on track to take in $25 million of net revenues during the current year and is also said to be doing flow-through revenues of around half-a-billion.The company itself says that two million nights have been booked using the system. The company is experiencing rapid growth in overseas markets. The New York Times reports that the company is racking up about 10,000 guests a night.

AirBnB is an amazing story of enterprenurial grit. More importantly the company is at the leading edge of what I have described a new peer-to-peer (or person-to-person) economy. This p2p economy is an area of much interest to me. Here is a video interview with AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky who shared his story with me a few months ago. In addition, Colleen Taylor interviewed his co-founder Joe Gebbia and I have embedded that interview as well.


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