Airbnb's latest round of funding

I just stumbled upon this recent article of Google pumping in over $500M into Airbnb with the new funds aiming to develop their experiences feature and help with litigation. This is obviously just a PR article and a bit high-level and more strategic than some of the tactical day-to-day challenges we usually discuss here. Does anyone know anything more about this or have any further thoughts on the news? http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-raised-555-million-2016-9

There is the litigation with SFO, but that might not be a valid enough reason to raise (tentatively) $850m.

Big checks are usually coming some time before any possible IPO/acquisition.

It helps Airbnb sustain the level of growth in key markets (China, India), and finance its own acquisitions (there is probably more to come in that direction).

The only real news here is that Google Capital is investing into Airbnb, which doesn’t seem to have been the case before. A part of this round might be FOMO (Fear of missing out).

In the grand scheme of things, a start-up funded by venture-capital is supposed to raise funds every 18 months or so. Airbnb’s last funding round (MASSIVE: $1.5 bn) was in March 2015: this is on the spot.

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This may be a naive question… but is Airbnb making a profit yet? I heard they weren’t? And like Amazon, the path to profitability might take a few years.

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I just did a quick search and last year, the WSJ predicted that Air would be profitable in 2020.

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