Entrepreneur First (EF), the company builder and “talent first” investor, held its eleventh Demo Day in London this afternoon. The event included newly formed startups from EF’s London, Berlin and Paris cohorts, and represented a showcase of the investor’s now pan-European reach.

Once again, the pitches took place in front of a near-overcapacity crowd at King’s Place in London’s King Cross area, and this time saw 29 startups pitch their wares to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene.

EF stands out from the many other demo days that the U.K. capital city hosts because of the way the investor backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that the companies pitching only came into existence during the three programmes and perhaps may never have seen the light of day without the founders bashing heads at EF.

The latest demo days also comes shortly after EF announced it has raised a $115 million new fund led by a number of leading (mostly unnamed) institutional investors across the U.S., Europe and Asia, including new anchor LP Trusted Insight. A number of well-known European entrepreneurs also invested, including Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise), Alex Chesterman (co-founder of Zoopla) and EF alumnus Rob Bishop (who co-founded Magic Pony Technology, which was bought by Twitter for a reported $150 million in 2016).

See also: EF raises $115M new fund, aiming to create another 300-plus startups in the next three years

This new fund — which EF said is one of the largest pre-seed funds ever raised — will enable the talent investor to back more than 2,200 individuals who join its various programs over the next three years. EF currently operates in Bangalore, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Paris.

Meanwhile, the themes for EF’s eleventh London Demo Day continued to reflect the company builder’s focus on recruiting the best technical and domain expert talent — both recent graduates and also people already working at tech companies. They spanned practically every gamut of the tech sector you could think of.

After enduring 29 rounds of “pitchlash” (up from 24 last time), TechCrunch’s picks, chosen by Editor-at-Large Mike Butcher, who attended, are as follows:

FabricNano
Fast Biotechnologies
Blazar
Alcemy
Semblr
Arthronica
SpeakAi
Vine Health
Seyo
Rosecut
CogniScent
Neoplants

Here’s the full list of presenting teams (in their own words) with some informal notes Mike made live at the event:

FabricNano – LONDON

FabricNano designs artificial cells that produce chemicals 100x faster.

TechCrunch comment: Fermentation of things like beer has been around for thousands of years. It’s now powering the global chemicals market. But we still rely on living cells to do the hard work. Improving the living cell by 1% would save the chemical plant millions of dollars a day. This startup makes an artificial living cell which is highly efficient. The cost has come down to do this. The founders have a history in mechanical engineering and DNA. They have chemical companies testing with them, and have filed some patents. They are raising £1.5m to accelerate this whole idea. Strong pitch!

Fast Biotechnologies – BERLIN

Fast Biotechnologies revolutionizes healthcare by enabling accurate diagnosis of life-threatening infections in minutes instead of days.

TechCrunch comment: Scepsis is killing people almost as much as cancer, globally. But detecting it is slow, and people die waiting for results. This startup uses a bacterium to detect it faster, and it’s the direct result of the founder’s PhD work. It’s already being tested in the lab. The founder didn’t say how much they are raising…

Leakmited – PARIS

Leakmited detects water leaks from space.

TechCrunch comment: Sounds cool huh?! Only 6% of water is good for human consumption and we waste a lot of it in leaks. 50 billion euros worth. Fixing leaks is easy, but finding them is tough and the tech hasn’t changed in years. The idea is that leaks change the properties of the ground, which can then be detected from space using pattern recognition, up to an accuracy of 20 meters which is a 1000% improvement. They will pilot this tech in France. Strong team, strong pitch. I’m wondering if this would be relatively easily replicable by a satellite company?

Candu – LONDON

Candu is a learning platform within your app, empowering you to upskill and retain your customers.

TechCrunch comment: Ex-Stanford founder pitches a learning platform that upskills users as they use the product. On the job training for this century. This decreases churn and improves the results. Well-trained customers are more likely to use and renew a Saas product. One of the co-founders helped build Coursera, so they have history in this space.

Blazar – PARIS

Blazar uses machine learning to predict cancer response to immunotherapy.

TechCrunch comment: Treating blood cancer better with ML-based prediction. They have a team which has built previous ML products and the co-founder who presented has been a cancer researcher for the last 14 years. This is sort of weaponizing the immune system against cancer. No mention of the money they want to raise.

Alcemy – BERLIN

Alcemy’s quality prediction AI enables cement and concrete producers to cut costs and carbon emissions.

TechCrunch comment: We make a lot of concrete on this planet. It can be a complex thing. But it’s often made stronger than it needs to be. Until recently it took a month to test the strength of the concrete. So they tend to make it too strong, and this also creates MORE carbon emissions. Instead, this solution test concrete quality in 40 minutes. Not bad, huh. The prototype has been tested with partners. They think they could save all the UK’s carbon emission. Strong pitch and thank god someone is thinking about the environment for a change…

Presscast – LONDON

Presscast is a new kind of advertising that is organic and scalable.

TechCrunch comment: Programmatic ads have ruined online content (don’t we know it)… Media doesn’t scale like tech. Content marketing plus programmatic. They call it “Natural language advertising”. This looks at articles online, and inserts your lines of text into the article. (I hate this already…). Finextra did this. They launched a week ago and have 500 publishers now. I’d love to know this list! Strangely they did not include whether or not the advert is flagged as such, which is worrying. They are raising a seed round.

Arthronica – LONDON

Arthronica is an AI monitoring and rehabilitation platform.

TechCrunch comment: Addressing a costly and chronic condition: Arthritis. Costs healthcare a lot of cash globally. Capturing data for treatment is expensive and has to happen face to face. Their AI architecture uses a smart phone camera to read the person’s muscle movements and then assess the level of treatment needed. I think this is a great idea and a natural use of ML in cameras / smartphones.

Semblr Technologies – LONDON

Semblr automates building construction using small, swarming robots.

TechCrunch comment: Robots! Using a big robot to build a house is inefficient. Use small ones! The first robot automates bricklaying. There is high demand for houses, but the workforce is not there. Previous bricklaying robots, they are WAY too big. A swarm of robots the size of a cat can build it faster. BaaS – Bricklaying as a service. LULZ. Cofounders are an ex-architect and ML expert. They are testing on real sites. Sounds convincing.

Packetai – PARIS

PacketAI uses AI to automate IT Operations.

TechCrunch comment: Resolving IT incidents using ML! Save lots of money! Crucial stuff but hard to make interesting in a pitch…

Nostos Genomics – BERLIN

Nostos Genomics uses CRISPR to unlock genomics-based medicine.

TechCrunch comment: Genetic diseases are more common than you think. But to get a treatment you need assessment and 70 percent of genetic tests fail. Their solution claims to be way more efficient at assessing genetic diagnoses.

Deltablock – PARIS

DeltaBlock adapts traditional capital liquidity services for Digital Assets.

TechCrunch comment: Sounds like a blockchain pitch which doesn’t want to mention the word blockchain… Surprise! Ok they mentioned it once. This is a market-maker for digital assets, like in traditional markets. Aiming at 100 billion Euro market. Starting in Switzerland, of course. They are raising in fiat money… Hard to assess this one.

Reallm – LONDON

Business intelligence for the supply-side of marketplaces.

TechCrunch comment: We understand the demand side of this world but the suppliers often get forgotten. So take Uber or something and they spot where user demand is being missed by lack of supply of drivers. This is a way for drivers or similar to work out where they can work more efficiently.

Panakeia Technologies – LONDON

Panakeia makes cancer diagnosis simpler, faster and cheaper by eliminating the need for multiple tests.

TechCrunch comment: Cancer diagnosis can take a month and is expensive. They do this by running ML over images of biopsies. Already have several test partners. Seems like a strong team.

Speak Ai – LONDON

The world’s most expressive and realistic artificial voices.

TechCrunch comment: This was the spookiest pitch of the day! The idea being that you could use this artificial voice inside video games. Saving enormous amounts of money. 5 paid pilots already. Voice in the video games industry is huge. Makes it as easy to edit voice as videos. “A photoshop for voice.” Impressive stuff.

Vine Health Digital – LONDON

Vine Health’s platform uses behavioral science and AI to increase the survival of cancer patients.

TechCrunch comment: If you make things hard or easier you have big consequences (fake flies in urinals etc). If you nudge a patient into better behavior they have better outcomes. They have trials with partners already. Co-founders are rather well qualified! Great advisory board. 95% of patients on-board. Excellent results from patients. This is a startup to watch.

CirPlus – BERLIN

CirPlus is the global marketplace for recycled materials.

TechCrunch comment: Make it EASY to buy recycled plastics rather than hard. Have had EU funding. Passionate founder.

Nanovery – LONDON

Nanovery is developing nanorobots to diagnose the world’s deadliest diseases.

TechCrunch comment: Detect cancer using a simple blood test? Have we heard this before? No – they are building a search function using nano-robots. Their nano-robots are cheaper, they say. Very hard to assess this, but it sounds good.

Seyo – LONDON

Seyo enables machines to cooperate autonomously in extreme environments without the internet.

TechCrunch comment: Machines don’t have a global clock and one microsecond out can throw a system. So Seyo creates a logical sequence which is not time-based. It means the machines can work off the grid. They can be used in heavy industries like mining, where there are many fatalities.

Rosecut Technologies – LONDON

Rosecut is a digital private bank that offers bespoke, regulated advice in real-time.

TechCrunch comment: Wealth management! Always of interest to VCs… Rosecut wants to help the middle market, just under private equity. Traditional private banks require a lot of money. Rosecut is aiming at these guys. Already have $4.3m worth of assets ready to on-board. Likely to be regulated by the FCA in the next few months. Founder Qiaojia was a former ace asset adviser.

SquareMind – PARIS

SquareMind allows robots to make skin cancer detection more accurate and accessible.

TechCrunch comment: 3D construction software for full body mapping, able to track the growth of moles on the body using off the shelf robots. Prototypes and patents.

Intropic – LONDON

Intropic provides data refineries for investment management firms.

TechCrunch comment: Asset managers are generally shit, lazy and inefficient. Hedge funds are already using Intropic. Because the world needs more efficient hedge funds…

Flowlity – PARIS

Flowlity’s mission is to bring Amazon supply chain efficiency to the rest of the world.

TechCrunch comment: Many industrial players lack the time to do this well, and don’t scale at the level of Amazon. This startup claims to address this. No more overstocks, shortages and lost sales. The team was in this space before.

Omini – PARIS

Omini brings lab testing closer to the patient.

TechCrunch comment: Faster blood testing. (Yes, another one). Biosensing devices for immediate blood tests. Their first product measures infections and inflammations. THANKFULLY they mentioned the huge disaster in this industry and made sure people knew they were different.

Sense Street – LONDON

Sense Street innovates capital market communications.

TechCrunch comment: Freeing the information that’s in chat rooms about capital markets with ML. They can pull sentiment out of the chat rooms and give clients better insight. So that’s nice.

QantEv – PARIS

QantEv optimizes provider networks for health insurers.

TechCrunch comment: Probably sounds great if you’re a health insurer… rather indecipherable to the rest of us.

Morta – LONDON

Morta digitizes and automatically enforces construction rules.

TechCrunch comment: Building documents are in PDF and paper. This is a very old-fashioned industry. Mistakes creep in. Codifying the designs and rules reduces mistakes. Building industry wins!

CogniScent – BERLIN

CogniScent provides AI-guided early detection of neurodegenerative diseases.

TechCrunch comment: The lack of a sense of smell is a key indicator of neurodegenerative diseases. So you take a smell test, fill out a test and the result claims to be a 90% accurate prediction of a neurodegenerative disease.

Neoplants – PARIS

Neoplants use synthetic biology to design plants for the future.

TechCrunch comment: Problem: You spend a lot of time indoors and indoor air pollution is much worse than outdoors, because of VOCs. Air purifiers are bullshit. And green plants have ZERO impact on air quality. So their indoor plant is biologically engineered to capture VCOs and process them. Patents galore. You could also use these to capture carbon outdoors. Where do I buy one?!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Meet the European startups that pitched at EF’s 11th Demo Day in London

Artiphon, the startup behind the electronic instrument that it’s dubbed the Instrument 1, has raised $2 million in seed funding.

We previously described the Instrument 1 as a symphony, rock band and DJ that you can hold in your hand. It’s a device that allows you to create the sounds of a guitar, violin, bass, piano or drum machine without any real training.

Back in 2015, Artiphon raised $1.3 million for the Instrument 1 on Kickstarter, blowing past its goal of $75,000. The new funding is a more traditional investment, led by Warner Music Group — in fact, it’s the first publicly announced investment from WMG Boost, Warner’s seed investment fund for music-related startups.

“As true innovators in music creativity, Artiphon is a strong example of the types of companies and products we seek to support,” said WMG’s head of innovation and emergin technology Jeff Bronikowski in a statement. “They’ve already expanded the concept of the musical instrument as a smart, connected device and we’re excited to help them drive the future of interactive music.”

Artiphon co-founder and CEO Mike Butera told me that his goal for the Instrument 1 is to remove skill as a barrier to entry for creating music. In fact, he recalled receiving responses to the Kickstarter campaign that said, “How dare you let anyone sound good? I worked so hard to sound good, and now you’re making that accessible to anyone.”

Butera’s response? “Welcome to the future.”

To be clear, he isn’t trying to replace traditional instruments — he said he still plays his classical violin. Nor does he think the product is just for beginners. Instead, he says the Instrument 1 (with pricing currently starting at $399) can also augment the skills of trained musicians, allowing them to make sounds they never could with a regular instrument.

While I spent more than a decade playing classical piano, it was basically half a lifetime ago — I think it’s fair to say that I fall closer to the beginner side of the spectrum.

So it was a real delight for me to try out the Instrument 1. With just a few pointers from Butera, I quickly found myself noodling around and making different instrument sounds. In some ways, it reminded me of playing Guitar Hero, but with far more expressiveness.

Butera, by the way, fully embraces that comparison. He told me, “We’re interested in making music as fun, or more fun, than playing games.”

Artiphon Founder and CEO Mike Butera

While the product is called the Instrument 1, Butera told me the name is meant to emphasize the idea of many instruments in one — it doesn’t mean Artiphon is already working on an Instrument 2. The startup may release more hardware in the future, but he said he wants to move away from “a consumer electronics mindset” where you convince someone to buy a new gadget every year or two, and instead create an instrument “that could last for years.”

“We are committed to the quality of the Instrument 1,” Butera said.

So the next steps for Artiphon include exploring more distribution channels, as well as building more software.

Artiphon has already created its own app for the Instrument 1, and the device is also compatible with a wide range of music software like Garage Band, but he said, “Okay, what can we do to help people actually play a song? It starts with the instrument … This is the foundation, now we’re getting to design experiences for people around the instrument that are in software.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Artiphon raises M round led by Warner Music

There are better employee perks than a ping-pong table. Seventy percent of Americans graduate college with student loan debt. That’s 45 million people who owe $1.6 trillion. So when employers use Goodly to offer $100 per month in student loan payback for a $6 fee, talent sticks around. The startup found 86 percent of employees said they’d stay with a company for at least five years if their employer helped pay down their student loans. Yet employers break even if workers stay just two extra months, and get a 5X return if they stay an extra year because it costs so much to hire and train replacement staff.

Now, Y Combinator-backed Goodly has raised a $1.3 million seed round led by Norwest. The startup hopes to capitalize on corporate America waking up to student loan payback as a benefit, which is expected to grow from being offered by 4 percent of companies today to 32 percent by 2021.

Goodly co-founder and CEO Greg Poulin knows the student loan crisis personally. “When I was in school, my father passed away very unexpectedly due to a heart attack. I had to borrow $80,000 for college at Dartmouth,” he tells me. His monthly payment is now $900. The stress that debt creates can poison the rest of your life. He says 21 percent of employees with student loan debt have delayed marriage, 28 percent have put off starting a family and 1 out of 8 divorces is now directly attributed to student loan debt. “I’ve seen first-hand how challenging it is for employees to save for retirement or start a family” when they’re strapped with debt, Poulin says.

He met his co-founder and CTO Hemant Verma when they started working at Zenefits’ founder Parker Conrad’s new employee onboarding startup, Rippling, in 2017. That taught them how simplifying the benefits sign-up process could become its own business. Typically it requires that benefits be integrated with a company’s financial software, like payroll, and be set up with proper provisioning access. It’s enough of a chore that companies don’t go to the trouble of offering student loan repayment.

Poulin and Verma started Goodly to create a “set it and forget it” system that automates everything. They charge $6 per month per participating employee and typically see adoption by 30 percent to 40 percent of employees. Rather than help with their monthly payment that includes interest, Goodly clients pay down their employees’ core debt so they can escape more quickly. Employees get a dashboard where they can track their debt and all of the contributions their company has made. Goodly hasn’t had a single customer churn since launch, demonstrating how badly employers want to keep job-hopping talent in their roles.

“We found that our people put off contributing to their 401ks and buying a house because of their student loan debt. We thought that offering a Student Loan Repayment Benefit would be a great low-cost and high-impact benefit to attract and retain talent while alleviating some of the stress and the financial burden on our employees,” says Kim Alessi, an HR generalist.

Goodly’s founders and first employees

The business opportunity here is relatively young, but there are a few competitors. Boston-based Gratify was acquired by First Republic, which Santa Monica’s Tuition.io pivoted to offering student loan benefits. But Goodly’s connection to so many potential clients plus its new funding could help it make student loan repayment a ubiquitous perk. Along with Norwest and YC, the funding comes from ACE & Company, Arab Angel, Zeno Ventures and angel investors, including Optimizely’s Pete Koomen, DreamHost’s Josh Jones, ShipStation’s Jason Hodges, Fairy’s Avlok Kohli and Telly’s Mo Al Adham.

Beyond improving talent retention, Goodly may also help erase some of the systematic discrimination against minorities in our country. Women hold 66 percent of all student loan debt, black and Latinx Americans have 31 percent more student debt than their peers and LGBTQ borrowers owe $16,000 more than an average member of the population. Convincing employers to address student loan debt could give everyone more freedom of choice when it comes to what they work on and how they live their lives.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Goodly replaces lame office perks with student loan repayment

[Editor’s note: This is part of a series we’re writing about branding for startups. Join our latest initiative to find the best brand designers and agencies in the world who work with early-stage companies by nominating a talented brand designer you’ve worked with.]  

Basecamp, maker of project management and team communications software, is a company that does things differently.

Co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson reject outside investment, make no long-term goals, ignore KPIs and forbid working on weekends. They focus on keeping the workday focused, enjoyable and short.

The company’s approach to work is an expression of its origin story, which revolves around frustration with poorly designed project management software. They created Basecamp in 1999 as a way to do things better.

A company’s brand identity can emanate from its origin story, which in Basecamp’s case might suggest simplicity and efficiency, perhaps a brand with a certain modern slickness. But Fried rejects that categorically. In fact, he comes close to rejecting the idea of brand identity altogether.

“For us, clarity is the most important thing,” he says. “We don’t have a visual guidelines saying ‘you can’t use this color next to that color.’ I feel like those exercises are mostly a waste of time.”

Spending time wisely is a defining value at Basecamp. Employees are encouraged to hold “office hours” to protect unbroken chunks of work time. The company doesn’t use digital meeting-scheduling software to prevent unnecessary meetings. And, of course, Basecamp software itself is all about making project management more streamlined.

This focus on helping people use their time well suggests a brand identity based on consideration of people’s experiences and needs at work: kind, attentive, supportive. When Fried finally comes around to describing Basecamp’s brand, he puts it like this: “We prefer to be cozy and approachable as opposed to sterile and museum-like. I feel like a lot of brands are overly slick; I think it’s intimidating and pushes people away.”

Basecamp, on the other hand, is all about bringing people in, about making them feel confident and well-cared-for. The company is designed to help people work smarter and happier, with the assurance that Basecamp has their back.  

The product itself and the product development cycle both reflect this perspective. The company focuses on making the simplest possible product with the fewest necessary features. It provides extremely straightforward pricing at $99/month for every customer. And it is known for a laser-like focus on improving its flagship product instead of developing other products, add-ons or features.

Every six weeks a management team decides on new projects to pursue based on ideas submitted by staff and customers. Such a short product development cycle means many people’s ideas can be implemented throughout the year and keeps the company nimble to pursue new things. The team emphasizes extreme care when developing and rolling out changes, concerned with the potential disruption to their customers’ work.

“We recognize that our customers who use Basecamp are managing projects with it, and those projects are ongoing and real,” says Fried. “And they have too much on their plate already to have the software they use change under them out of nowhere.”

It’s this focus on customer experience that is Basecamp’s special sauce — the core of its origin story; the center of its brand identity; the ethos behind its thoughtful product development procedures; and the force behind its workplace innovations that keep its 50 employees in 32 cities happy.

Placing high value on the perspectives of customers and employees is the most powerful way to align brand, product development and company culture. But it takes a dose of humility and a dollop of empathy.

“Real people use our stuff,” says Fried. “We are not the most important thing in their day. We are a tool they use to get their work done. Whatever we do, we should focus on doing the least disruptive thing for them.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | For Basecamp, brand identity and product development are all about the customer

Kespry, a company that offers industrial users a subscription-based drone service, today announced that it has raised funding from Salesforce Ventures, marking that firm’s first hardware investment. With this, Salesforce and Kespry are also partnering around bringing Kespry’s drone services for the insurance industry to Salesforce’s own tools for this vertical. Sadly, the companies did not disclose the actual funding amount, but our understanding is that it’s a substantial amount that’s comparable to other Salesforce Ventures investments.

With its focus on industrial use cases, the company, which was founded in 2013, has developed a strong foothold in the mining and aggregates space, where it offers tools for doing volumetric measurements of stockpiles based on the imagery it captures from its drones, for example. In addition, though, the company also focuses on the construction, insurance and — most recently — energy sector.

Today, Kespry has more than 300 customers, the company’s CEO George Mathew tells me. More than 200 of those are in the mining and aggregates business and more than 40 of these signed up for the company’s services in the last 12 months alone.

So while drones may not be at the top of the hype cycle right now, those companies that found their niche early on are clearly thriving. “Drones are very much a vibrant and moving landscape in terms of how much activity has gone on,” he said. “For us, we’ve been largely and continuously focused on the commercial aspects of the market that we can solve for really difficult industrial challenges. […] But I think others have had some challenges because it’s not the most straightforward thing to figure out a viable business model for scale in the drone space.”

Mathew argues that Kespry’s subscription model and the fact that it offers an end-to-end hardware and software solution is one of the reasons the company is thriving today.

The Salesforce investment came about thanks to a chance encounter with that company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, at an industry event. As Salesforce was looking to offer more vertically oriented applications for the insurance industry, there was clearly a role for Kespry in this business. “We saw a lot of need in the insurance space to get a claim processed when it comes to physical damage that may have occurred after a catastrophic event,” Mathew said. In those cases, Salesforce’s tools may be used to dispatch adjudicators already and these claims adjusters often also use Kespry’s services to fly the drones to assess roof damage, for example.

Kespry also signed on to Saleforce’s Pledge 1% program; as part of this, it contributes one percent of its employees’ time to corporate social responsibility and charitable endeavors.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Enterprise drone service Kespry raises new funding from Salesforce Ventures

For $181 per night, Airbnb guests can stay in a castle in Galway, Ireland.

Many have taken the home-sharing business up on this offer with the company sharing today the castle supplies its most-booked private room. Along with that fun datapoint, Airbnb shared a slew of other stats indicating an upward trajectory for the 12-year-old company.

Most notably, Airbnb has just recorded its 500 millionth guest arrival across one of its 6 million homes, yurts, tree houses, boats and more. 

Airbnb crossing the half-billion mark isn’t surprising given recent aggressive expansion strategies. Valued at $31 billion, the San Francisco-headquartered business recently announced it would acquire HotelTonight in a deal reported to be worth roughly $465 million.

Airbnb’s long-term goal is to build an end-to-end travel platform complete with home sharing, hotel booking, business travel arrangements, experiences and more. Folding in HotelTonight, a mobile app that lets travelers arrange last-minute accommodations, accelerates its path toward owning the peer-to-peer rental market and more. Already amongst the most acquisitive unicorns, per Crunchbase News, Airbnb is also in said to be considering purchasing a stake in Oyo, an Indian hotel startup.

According to the analytics platform Second Measure, Airbnb is rapidly surpassing hospitality incumbents. Since 2016, Airbnb has tripled sales, while larger hotel chains have observed sales growth of just 11 percent. Airbnb’s annual sales have overtaken IHG and Hilton, and are well on their way to exceeding Marriott, which has dominated the industry since acquiring Starwood Hotels in 2016.

All of this bodes well for Airbnb, which is said to be considering a 2019 or 2020 initial public offering. The company has to date raised $4.4 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding from venture capital investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. In January, Airbnb said it was profitable for the second consecutive year on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) basis.

In addition to the 500 million milestone, Airbnb has shared that its hosts have earned $65 billion from renting out space on the platform. That number is expected to swell, quick, as Airbnb says it saw 152 percent growth in the number of rooms available on its platform. The geographic distribution of guests has expanded, too, with outlying markets increasing their share of arrivals.

Finally, the age of hosts has become more diverse. Seniors are now the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S. while 70 percent of bookings in the last three years were made by guests under the age of 40. Millennials around the world have spent over $31 billion booking travel on Airbnb.

Airbnb currently dominates the peer-to-peer rental industry, but with Expedia gaining market share via its subsidiary HomeAway and Bookings Holdings doing its best to compete through Bookings.com, Kayak and Priceline, Airbnb may not be able to sustain this growth rate.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Airbnb just checked in its 500 millionth guest