Airbnb doesn’t even own a bed, but its backers think it’s more valuable than Hyatt

March 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Airbnb doesn’t even own a bed, but its backers think it’s more valuable than Hyatt
By John McDuling @jmcduling an hour ago
Airbnb, the website emblematic of the “sharing economy” that matches up travelers online with people looking to rent out rooms or entire homes, is close to securing fresh funding that would value the business at $10 billion, the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported this morning.Astonishingly, that would rank the company ahead of hotel chains like Hyatt, InterContental and Wyndham, companies that own substantial physical assets and have thousands of rooms available around the planet. Hyatt, for example, owns 500 properties in 46 countries.

Funding at a $10-billion valuation would also make Airbnb Inc. one of the most highly valued venture-capital-backed startups on the planet, alongside cloud storage company Dropbox and Chinese mobile internet company Xiaomi. One of the world’s preeminent private equity firms, TPG, is likely to lead the funding round, according to the Journal.

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Filed under TMT Trends

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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