- Home-sharing company Airbnb confirmed its plans to go public in 2020. The specific timeframe for the IPO was not disclosed
Home sharing platform Airbnb had confirmed on Thursday that it is planning to go public in 2020. However, the company did not specify which quarter in 2020 that it is going public.
According to The New York Times, Airbnb reported second quarter revenue of $1 billion and offers places to stay across more than 100,000 cities around the world.
Ever since CEO Nathan Blecharczyk, chief product officer Joe Gebbia, and chief strategy officer Nathan Blecharczyk launched Airbnb, the company has raised more than $4 billion in venture capital.
Airbnb currently has a valuation of $31 billion and it will have one of the highest valued public offerings. In the past year, Airbnb also made a number of key hires including Fred Reid as the global head of transportation, Dave Stephenson as CFO, and Ari Balogh as CTO.
This announcement is unusual as most technology startups keep plans to go public secret. The New York Times’ sources said that Airbnb made this news public in order to potentially offer equity to the hosts on its platform. And Airbnb has to unveil plans to go public before offering shares to the host due to a securities law. Plus Airbnb also considered a direct listing where a company lists shares without raising additional capital just like Spotify and Slack did.
Several technology companies went public this year. While Uber and Lyft has been trading below their opening prices, Zoom, Slack, CloudFlare, and Pinterest are trading above its IPO prices. WeWork was planning to go public, but then it postponed the plans due to the questionable governance and the mounting losses revealed in the S-1 documents.
