Airbnb To Go Public In 2020

Airbnb is not in a rush to go public. According to a brief statement issued by the company today, the San Francisco-based travel company said “it expects to become a publicly-traded company during 2020.”

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It didn’t provide further details so we reached out in an attempt to find out more. An Airbnb representative told Crunchbase News that the company didn’t have anything to add to today’s announcement.

Since its founding in 2008, Airbnb has raised a total of $4.4 billion, according to its Crunchbase profile. This includes venture funding and debt financing. The company also engaged in a number of secondary market transactions, but the amount of money exchanged in those deals was not disclosed.

The company’s last known private market valuation, from its March 2017 tranche of its Series F round, was approximately $30.5 billion.

Backers include TCV, Capital G, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), among others.

It’s also on an acquisition spree with 21 acquisitions to date, according to Crunchbase. Most recently, in August, it picked up Urbandoor, which gives people a way to find serviced apartments when traveling for work, for an undisclosed amount.

The company gave a peek into its finances on Wednesday, saying in a statement that it had more than $1 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2019, according to Reuters. It’s the second time Airbnb has surpassed that level of revenue in its history.

A slew of tech companies have gone public this year, though with mixed results. Highly-anticipated IPOs like Uber and Lyft didn’t live up to the hype once they started trading on the public markets.

However, Airbnb is in a decidedly different position than other highly-valued, massively-capitalized tech companies eyeing public market debuts. Unlike the aforementioned ride-hailing giants, and real estate management firm The We Company, Airbnb has managed to turn a profit. In fact, 2018 marked the second year in a row in which Airbnb turned a profit, on an EBITDA basis.

Clearly, Airbnb is growing at a rapid clip. Last month, people familiar with Airbnb’s financials told the Wall Street Journal that the company was growing revenues by over 30 percent, through Q1 2019. Multiple people told the Journal that, again as of Q1, the company had “about $3.5 billion” in cash on its balance sheet.

According to its website, Airbnb is home to more than 7 million listings in more than 100,000 cities in over 191 countries.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias