Airbnb, now valued upwards of $30 billion and inching toward an IPO possibly as early as this year, has made an acquisition to continue to diversify its revenues beyond basic booking services for overnight accommodations in private homes. It has acquired Gaest, a startup out of Aarhus, Denmark that provides a marketplace-style platform for people to post and book venues in hourly or daily increments for meetings and other work-related events like off-sites in Europe and elsewhere.
Gaest’s team — it was founded in 2015 by Anders Boelskifte Mogensen (the CEO), Chris Kjær Sørensen, Christian Schwarz Lausten and Jonas Grau Sigtenbjerggaard — will be joining Airbnb and will report to president of Homes Greg Greeley. Airbnb says the service — which currently has listings for some 3,000 venues from hotels to co-working spaces and other rooms — will remain operational on its own platform “for the foreseeable future.” It’s not clear if the Gaest brand will remain as a part of that.
“We’re thrilled to join one of the world’s most innovative companies and become an integral part of their mission to make it easier for professionals to feel a sense of belonging at work,” said Mogensen in a statement. “Our dream from day one has been to make it easier, faster, and more cost-effective to list, discover, and book unique spaces that spark creativity, motivate interaction and encourage knowledge sharing.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we are trying to find out. According to Crunchbase, Gaest had raised $3.5 million.
The acquisition points to two strategic developments at Airbnb, both aimed at helping the company diversity and grow its revenues.
The first is that it will build on Airbnb’s expansion into services for the business market.
This is an area where Airbnb has already been building inroads: It’s had a program in place since last year called Airbnb for Work, aimed at the business travel market and booking accommodations for business travelers, and it says that to date some 700,000 companies have seen employees sign up and book accommodation through the program.
