Timeline of Airbnb

This is a timeline of Airbnb, a website for people to rent out lodging, and the associated company.

Big picture

Time period	Development summary	More details
October 2007 - January 2009	Conception, bootstrapping	The initial concept is created by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. They launch the website. To raise money, they sell cereal boxes for Barack Obama and John McCain, candidates for the 2008 United States presidential election.
January 2009 - December 2010	Angel and venture funding, beginning of business takeoff	Airbnb becomes part of the Winter 2009 Y Combinator class. The business grows steadily. Brian Chesky moves out of his own apartment to live off Airbnb for three months. In November 2010, Airbnb raises $7.2 million in venture funding.
January 2011 - April 2014 (mostly), partly ongoing	International expansion, more fundraising, steady growth	Airbnb begins operations in many cities around the world, and continues to grow steadily in usage.
January 2014 – present	User experience, peace with the law, partnerships, more fundraising	Airbnb redesigns its logo, launches new apps and an improved user experience, and strikes deals with city authorities in San Francisco and other cities that would make its service legally recognized while also requiring it to tax rentals. Airbnb also begins offering $1 million in insurance to both parties in its rental transactions. By June 2015, the total money raised by the company to-date is $2.3 billion, of which $1.5 billion was in the most recent round. It also starts partnerships with Handy, Concur, and Deutsche Telekom.

Full timeline

Year	Month and date	Event type	Details
2007	October	Idea creation	Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia create the initial concept for AirBed & Breakfast during the Industrial Design Conference held by Industrial Designers Society of America. The original site offers short-term living quarters, breakfast and a unique business networking opportunity for attendees who were unable to book a hotel in the saturated market. Chesky and Gebbia themselves use Airbnb to help meet the rent for their loft in San Francisco.
2008	February	Team	Harvard University graduate and technical architect Nathan Blecharczyk joins as the third co-founder of AirBed & Breakfast.
2008	August 11	Product	The Airbedandbreakfast.com website launches.
2008	August–November	Funding	In order to raise enough seed money to sustain their business, Airbnb sells cereal boxes for Barack Obama and John McCain. They sell 800 boxes at $40 each, netting $30,000 in funding for the company. Their most successful single sale event is the Democratic National Convention in November 2008.
2009	January	Funding	Airbnb is accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2009 batch and receives $20,000 in funding. Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham says that even though he is not a fan of Airbnb's idea, he is impressed by their creative methods for bootstrapping their funding situation by selling cereal.
2009	March	Product	The website name is shortened from Airbedandbreakfast.com to Airbnb.com, and the site's content has expanded from air beds and shared spaces to a variety of properties including entire homes and apartments, private rooms, castles, boats, manors, tree houses, tipis, igloos, private islands and other properties.
2010	June 21	Team	In response to increasing overcrowding at his residence, that is doubling up as an Airbnb office, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky decides to move out of his apartment and live using Airbnb for a few months.
2010	November	Funding	Airbnb receives $7.2 million in Series A funding from Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital, and announces that out of 700,000 nights booked, 80% had occurred in the past six months.
2011	February	Usage milestone	Airbnb announces its 1 millionth booking since the website launch in August 2008.
2011	March 16–17	Funding	Venture capitalist Fred Wilson publishes a blog post saying that his firm's decision not to invest in Airbnb was a mistake. The next day, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham publishes (with permission) correspondence between himself and Fred Wilson about the possibility of Wilson investing in Airbnb.
2011	May 25	Endorsements	Actor and partner at A-Grade Investments, Ashton Kutcher, announces a significant investment in the company and his role as a strategic brand advisor for the company.
2011	May 31	Acquisitions by Airbnb, international expansion	Airbnb acquires Accoleo, a small German clone of its service, thereby expanding to Germany.
2011	June 29 - August 1	Controversy, missteps	A woman, writing online under the name EJ, wrote on her blog that she had rented her apartment out using Airbnb and found that it was completely trashed with many of her valuable personal items stolen. The post was picked up on Hacker News and by Michael Arrington for TechCrunch. Airbnb investor Paul Graham wrote a note defending Airbnb and critical of Arrington, which received media circulation and criticism. On August 1, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky wrote a blog post apologizing for Airbnb's initially tepid response, and announcing a suite of features as part of the new Airbnb Safety Program: Airbnb Guarantee of $50,000 for hosts such as EJ who report property damage, a 24-hour customer hotline, a doubling of customer support, and more responsiveness to customer concerns.
2011	July 24	Funding	Airbnb raises $112 million in additional funding. The investment round is led by Andreessen Horowitz and other investors include DST Global Solutions and General Catalyst Partners.
2011	October	Funding, controversy	An email allegedly written by Chamath Palihapitiya to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, that was critical of the manner in which Airbnb was structuring its funding round, is leaked to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. A follow-up reveals that new aspects of the deal are in development that might alleviate some of the concerns expressed by Palihapitiya, and he is reconsidering his decision not to invest in the funding round. He also expressed regret about the email being leaked, and he said that he was not responsible for the leak.
2011	October	International expansion	Airbnb opens up its second international office in London in the United Kingdom.
2012	January	Usage milestone	Airbnb announces its 5 millionth booking.
2012	(early year)	International expansion	Airbnb opens six international offices, in the cities Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Moscow, and São Paulo. These are in addition to existing offices in San Francisco, London, Hamburg, and Berlin where Airbnb maintains its international presence for the EMEA markets within a German incubator space.
2012	June	Usage milestone	Airbnb announces its 10 millionth booking.
2012	July 25	Acquisitions by Airbnb, international expansion	Shortly before the 2012 Summer Olympics Airbnb acquires London-based rival CrashPadder, subsequently adding six thousand international listings to its existing inventory.
2012	November 2	International expansion	Airbnb co-founder and CEO Chesky announces his focus on Australia, the second largest Airbnb market behind the United States, as well as Thailand and Indonesia. To support this effort, Airbnb opens its 11th office in Sydney. The Australian consumer accounts for one-tenth of the Airbnb user base.
2012	November 12	International expansion	Airbnb announces its strategy to move more aggressively into the Asian market with the launch of their newest headquarters in Singapore. The company's goal is to acquire an additional 2 million properties within the continent.
2012	November 13	Acquisitions by Airbnb	Airbnb acquires NabeWise, a city guide that aggregates curated information for specified locations, in November 2012. This acquisition shifts the company focus toward offering hyperlocal recommendations to travelers.
2012	December 13	Acquisitions by Airbnb	Airbnb announces the acquisition of Localmind. Localmind is a location-based question and answer platform that allows users to post questions about specific locations online. These questions are then answered in real-time by experts on the specified territories.
2013	September	International expansion	Airbnb announces that European headquarters would be located in Dublin, Ireland.
2014	January 31	Partnerships	Airbnb announces plans to partner with home cleaning services whereby the home cleaning service is available at a discount to those who are about to host people via Airbnb, in order to incentivize hosts to prepare homes well for guests and also give guests a more standardized experience. Prospective partners include Homejoy and Handybook.
2014	March 14	Company	Airbnb announces plans to open a new "operational headquarters" for North America in Portland, Oregon, in summer 2014, but indicated that its main North American headquarters would remain in San Francisco.
2014	April (unofficial rumors), August 1 (announcement in SEC filing)	Funding	It is announced in April that Airbnb is getting an investment by TPG Capital at a valuation of approximately $10 billion. The amount of funding is variously reported as $450 million and $500 million. On August 1, the round is revealed to be a $475 million round.
2014	July 16	Product	Airbnb reveals design revisions to their site and mobile app, and introduced a new logo. Some consider the new icon to be visually similar to genitalia, but a consumer survey by Survata shows only a minority of respondents thought this was the case.
2014	July 21	Partnerships	Airbnb announces that its home cleaning trial will be in three cities, and lists Handybook as its sole partner. Homejoy, which had earlier been listed as a partner, is dropped.
2014	July 28	Partnerships	Airbnb announces a parternship with Concur, an expense reporting service for businesses, to make it easier for business travelers to report Airbnb stays as business expenses.
2014	September 17	Financial/legal	Airbnb announces that it will start collecting and remitting a 14% tax for short-term rentals in San Francisco starting October 1.
2014	October 23	Funding	Airbnb announces arrangements for an employee stock sale. Valuations for the sale are rumored at around $13 billion.
2014	October 27	Financial/legal	San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee signs a law making short-term rentals legal in San Francisco, thereby legalizing Airbnb. The law gets the moniker of "Airbnb law" because Airbnb is the most affected company.
2014	November 3	Financial/legal	Vacation rental company HomeAway sues San Francisco for the Airbnb Law.
2014	November 20	Product	Airbnb expands its liability insurance program for hosts and landlords. Whereas the initial liability insurance program was limited to property damage due to the guest, the new program $1 million worth of protection in the case a guest is accidentally injured anywhere in a host’s building or on their property during their stay. Rentals starting January 15, 2015 will automatically be covered under the new program.
2015	January 30	Financial/legal	Airbnb announes that it will start collecting taxes in Amsterdam, San Jose, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
2015	February 25	Partnerships	Airbnb announces a partnership with Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile, to have its app pre-installed on mobile phones in 13 countries. Those who register for the service via DT will get 30 euros of vouchers to stay in Airbnb rooms.
2015	April 29	Product, accessibility	Airbnb launches an official iPad app.
2015	June 4	Product	Airbnb adds a pricing recommendation tool, called Price Tips, offering suggestions on appropriate prices for people renting our apartments.
2015	June 28	Funding	Airbnb closes $1.5 billion in additional funding, bringing its funding total to $2.3 billion. The valuation for the round is $25.5 billion. Both the amount raised and the valuation are higher than those originally projected when rumors of the round originally circulated in late February/early March (when the numbers were $1 billion and $20 billion respectively).
2015	August 25 (announcement), October 1 (start date)	Legal	Airbnb announces that it will start collecting a tourist tax on Airbnb rentals in Paris starting October 1. The tax amount will be 0.83 euros per night.
2015	September 3	Product	Airbnb releases an app for the Apple Watch, whose main focus is to facilitate communication between guests and hosts.
2015	September 11	Acquisitions by Airbnb	Airbnb announces its acquisition of Vamo, a company based in Seattle whose product is a multi-city trip planning app. The app would be shut down as part of the acquisition; the purpose of the acquisition is to use the team's expertise to help with the aspects of the user experience related to travel beyond just booking an Airbnb.
2015	November 4	Financial/legal	San Francisco voters vote No on Proposition F, a measure to restrict Airbnb rentals in the city. In the run-up to the vote, Airbnb spent over $8 million in advertising to the public against the measure, whereas groups supporting Proposition F spent less than a million dollars. As part of its advertising campaign, Airbnb put out ads highlighting the role that the $12 million in taxes paid by it has played in funding city operations, but the ads are perceived by many as tasteless, so the company withdraws them and apologizes.
2015	November 12	Product, partnerships	Airbnb announces a new "Business Travel Ready" badge and host tools.