short-term-rentals
(23)
Locale put a kitchen in the hotel. Then it changed the business.
Locale made apartment living bookable by the night. Its more revealing invention was behind the door: a shift from carrying leases to managing properties for fees, followed by a sale to Mint House.
Domio gave group travel a living room. The rent kept coming.
The apartment-hotel startup understood why friends and families disliked being scattered across hotel rooms. Its harder problem was paying for all that togetherness when travel stopped.
The Insurance Company Hiding in the Checkout
Tint turns a platform’s awkward coverage gap into insurance offered at the precise moment a customer needs it. Its founders learned the problem at Turo; now they sell the machinery, and sometimes the program, to everyone else.
The Air Purifier That Learned to Testify
WYND began with a pocket-size answer to dirty air. Its more consequential invention may be a sensor that tells a hotel manager what happened in a room - while there is still time to act.
Tim Roy Built a Business Around the Five Hours Between Guests
The civil engineer turned one awkward cleaning handoff into Turno, a global marketplace built for the frantic interval after checkout and before the next key turns in the door.
Assaf Karmon Turned a Tuesday Cleaning Problem Into a Global Marketplace
A late reply, a double-booked cleaner and one changed checkout date gave a software engineer his opening. The useful company came only after the first idea failed.
Hostaway made a business out of your vacation’s busywork
Behind the holiday photos sit calendars, cleaners and a small mountain of messages. Hostaway turned that administrative mess into a software business, survived a travel shutdown and is now betting on AI to handle more of the shift.
Lavanda Was a Laundry App. Then the Landlords Called.
A consumer laundry service discovered its best customers were property operators with a stranger problem: empty beds, mismatched software and no clean way to mix hotel-speed stays with residential leases. Lavanda followed the demand and built the operating system instead.
Amiad Soto Started With Cleaning Supplies. Now He Is Automating the Messy Middle of Travel
Guesty began with two opinionated twins, a beach interrupted by guest messages, and a pair of founders holding cleaning supplies. Thirteen years later, Amiad Soto is still chasing the same idea: make the invisible work of hospitality disappear.
Guesty Turned Airbnb Chaos Into a Control Room - Now It Wants AI to Run the Night Shift
The Soto twins began by doing the chores behind an Airbnb listing. Thirteen years later, Guesty is selling the control room - and betting that an army of software agents can run much of it.
RedAwning Built the Plumbing Behind 20,000 Vacation Rentals - Then Travel Stopped
RedAwning promised one connection to every major booking shelf. A pandemic forced it to shrink, refocus, and turn that distribution network into a fuller operating system for hosts.
Travelio
Travelio is an Indonesian property-technology company that runs an online marketplace and end-to-end management platform for apartments, houses and villas. Founded in Jakarta in 2015, it lets landlords hand over units for professional management while giving tenants furnished, standardized homes they can book and pay for daily, monthly or annually - including a rare month-by-month payment option in a market that traditionally demands a full year up front. Often called 'Indonesia's Airbnb,' Travelio manages roughly 15,000 exclusive properties across a dozen cities and is expanding into rent-to-own housing.
KEY.co
KEY.co is an Austin-based luxury travel company that reimagines the vacation rental as a hotel-grade service experience. It curates design-forward homes and pairs them with in-home services - pre-arrival grocery stocking, private chefs, in-home spa and massage, and a dedicated guest-services team - across dozens of destinations in the U.S., Caribbean, Mexico and Canada. Founded in 2014 by Kim Lalande, the company operates as a three-sided marketplace connecting travelers, property managers and local vendors, and has raised roughly $15.8M to date.
Truvi
Truvi (formerly Superhog) is a London-based technology company that helps vacation-rental property managers and hosts screen guests and protect their properties across every booking channel. Its platform combines ID verification and biometric checks, background and sex-offender screening, customizable damage protection of up to $1 million per booking, and a dedicated claims team - letting operators drop traditional security deposits while building trust between owners and guests. Founded in 2019 and led by CEO Humphrey Bowles, the company serves 800+ property managers globally and raised £5.5M in Series A funding in 2023.
Kim Lalande
Kim Lalande is the founder and CEO of KEY.co, an Austin-based hospitality marketplace that pairs vetted luxury vacation homes with in-home concierge services such as private chefs, grocery stocking, and in-home massage. Drawing on years of business-heavy travel and hotel stays, she built KEY to close the gap between the space of a private home and the service of a five-star hotel. Since founding the company in 2014, she has grown it to thousands of curated homes across dozens of destinations in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean, raising roughly $16-18M in venture funding along the way.
igloo (igloohome / igloocompany)
igloo (legally igloocompany Pte Ltd, known to consumers as igloohome) is a Singapore-founded smart access company building keyless, offline-capable smart locks, padlocks and keyboxes plus the cloud software to manage them at scale. Born out of two founders' frustration with handing over physical keys to Airbnb guests, the company's patented algoPIN/algoPass technology generates time-bound PIN codes and digital keys that work without WiFi at the lock. Today igloo serves both consumers and enterprises - through its iglooworks and iglooaccess platforms - across 80+ countries, syncing with Airbnb, Vrbo and hundreds of property-management systems.
Airbnb
Airbnb is a global travel marketplace that lets hosts rent out homes, rooms, and experiences to guests in more than 220 countries and regions. Born in 2008 from three air mattresses on a San Francisco apartment floor, it turned spare space into a category-defining business, went public in 2020 at roughly a $100 billion valuation, and in 2025 expanded beyond stays into Services and a redesigned Experiences product - positioning itself as an everything app for travel.
At Home (WelcomeAtHome)
WelcomeAtHome is a residential property management company based in Eindhoven that maintains and manages hundreds of high-quality homes for short- and long-term rental across the south of the Netherlands. It handles the full lifecycle of letting a home - tenant screening, key handovers, inspections, maintenance coordination, and administration - so that, in its own words, both tenant and landlord benefit when real estate is really well arranged.
Beyond
Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing) is a San Francisco-based revenue management platform for short-term rental owners and property managers. Its data-driven pricing engine, market insights, booking engine, and OTA distribution tools help hosts and managers grow bookings across 340,000+ listings in 7,500+ cities. Bessemer-backed and led by CEO Julie Brinkman, Beyond has powered billions in booking revenue and is widely viewed as the category's category-definer.
Amr Aloufi
Amr Aloufi is a Co-Founder at Beyond (formerly Beyond Pricing), a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that uses AI and dynamic pricing algorithms to maximize revenue for short-term rental property managers and vacation rental hosts worldwide. With roots in Saudi Arabia and a background in business administration and human resources, Aloufi brought operational and business development acumen to a company that has grown to serve 715,000+ listings across 44,000+ cities, raised $46M in funding, and priced over $15 billion in bookings.
Julie Brinkman
Julie Brinkman is CEO of Beyond, the leading revenue management platform for short-term rental operators. She joined as COO on March 2, 2020 - just 10 days before global COVID travel bans - and navigated the company through the pandemic to emerge stronger, earning her promotion to CEO in February 2021. A University of Michigan Ross School of Business alumna, Brinkman spent a decade at Deloitte before sharpening her growth instincts at Groupon and Hireology. She now leads a global team of ~310 across 30 countries, focused on replacing gut-feel pricing with data-driven revenue optimization for property managers worldwide.
Kevin Yuann
Kevin Yuann is the CEO of Peerspace, the leading marketplace for hourly venue rentals with over 45,000 unique spaces across seven countries. A veteran operator who spent a decade at NerdWallet - including as Chief Business Officer through a 15x revenue growth period and the company's 2021 IPO - Yuann brings a rare combination of consumer finance expertise and marketplace instincts to Peerspace. He holds a BA in Business Economics and Visual Arts from Brown University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson, and he took the helm at Peerspace in May 2024 as the platform crossed $500 million in total sales and one million bookings.
Zumper
Zumper is North America's largest privately held rental marketplace, making it as easy to rent a home as it is to book a hotel. The company aggregates millions of long-term, short-term and monthly listings across the U.S. and Canada, layering instant tours, digital applications and tenant screening on top.