With further expansion of its home rental network across the globe, Airbnb is planning to add to its existing set of capabilities to prevent fraudulent individuals from scamming or hurting hosts and guests on the platform. Bloomberg reports that the company has decided to buy out Trooly, which is a small unknown startup that specializes in background check authentication.
While the acquisition of the startup has been confirmed by an Airbnb spokesperson over email, they’ve not disclosed the financial terms of this transaction. It has also not doled out more info on how the company’s workforce or technology will be amalgamated with the company’s own travel-focused product. Further, talking about the acquisition, the Airbnb spokesperson goes on to add:
We look forward to welcoming the Trooly team to Airbnb in the coming weeks. We’ll continue working together to better facilitate trust between strangers on, off and across the platform — supporting Airbnb’s overall strategy to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
This will be an extension of the long-standing partnership between the two companies since Airbnb has been employing Trooly’s technology to authenticate user identities on its platform since 2015. But, the company is now seeing this aspect of the Trooly as another integral aspect of their core business. Airbnb is acquiring the intellectual property and engineering team to further build upon its existing fraud detection tools.
There have been several instances where Airbnb has been trouble controlling the actions of either both the hosts or guests, where the former have looted the latter. There have also been cases where imposters have posed as hosts to threaten the guests who book an accommodation.
Otherwise, guests have also tried to bypass the platform and gain a direct line of contact to host to undercut the company’s deal. It now believes that a deeper integration of Trooly’s technology into their own services will be uber-beneficial for Airbnb, who’s been growing as a platform over the past year. It had already upgraded its policies and debuted two-factor authentication to seal some of the security loopholes.
Headquartered in California, Trooly was founded by a trio of individuals, namely Anish Das Sarma, Savi Baveja, Nilesh Dalvi back in 2014. The company developed an ‘Instant Trust’ technology, which analyzes and keeps track of any individual digital footprint in real-time.
This means it scours the interwebs — search engines, online public records, social platforms and much more to build out robust profiles containing info well beyond old-school background checks, credit scores, as well as risk management tools. Trooly also recently added a fresh $10 million to its coffers to expand on its technological platform. Even Airbnb has recently raised around $1 billion at a swelling valuation of $31 billion, which is only expected to grow in this burgeoning home rental economy.
