Short-term lodging rental company Airbnb is buying Trooly, a background check startup co-founded by Savi Baveja, Anish Das Sarma and Nilesh Dalvi, in an effort to protect its hosts and guests from trouble makers using its service.
Trooly analyses user data from social media, public records, and various other sources to verify the identity of users and prevent the registration of scammers or other bad actors.
The Los Altos, California-based company has been helping Airbnb authenticate user identities since 2015. By analysing data from public records, social media and other sources, Trooly's technology could help Airbnb track various customer violations, such as side deals between guests and hosts, according to a Bloomberg report.
According to the report, Airbnb is expected to purchase Trooly's intellectual property and engineering team on Monday.
"We look forward to welcoming the Trooly team to Airbnb in the coming weeks," Airbnb spokesman Tim Rathschmidt told Bloomberg, without providing a specific purchase price or other details of the arrangement between the two companies.
Since its inception in 2008, Airbnb has found the task of whetting fraudulent listings a truly difficult one, as many people have been posing as property owners. Trooly's data analysis has helped the verification process immensely and the purchase of the company will help Airbnb consolidate host and guest data to make oversight more efficient.
In recent years, some Airbnb guests have been reportedly circumventing the service's system to conduct side deals on social media or offer to pay hosts directly after locating them on the service. The purchase of Trooly should help Airbnb verify the identities of users on its platform more stringently.
Airbnb takes as much as a 12 percent fee from its guests. Hosts are charged a 3 percent fee on listings that are booked. In most cases, the company is also required to charge guests a local tax, usually 3 per cent, though the tax rates vary by city, state and country.
Founded in 2008, Airbnb raised $1.5 billion in December 2015. In 2016, it reportedly raised $10 million, according to venture capital tracking portal Crunchbase. It raised an additional $1 billion from unnamed investors in a funding round in March this year, expanding its warchest at a time of increased investor interest in fast-growing businesses.
Airbnb raised $1 billion as part of the financing round which started in 2016, which had valued the business at $30 billion. Airbnb's current valuation is understood to be approximately $25.5 billion.
Over the years, Airbnb has raised more than $3 billion, and secured $1 billion as line of credit, according to research firm CB Insights. Airbnb, based in San Francisco, is the No.2 most valuable private company in the United States behind Uber, the ride-hailing business, according to CB Insights.
