Expedia Buys Two Startups to Help Landlords Turn Apartments Into Short-Term Rentals
Skift Take
When it comes to the acquisition game, Expedia Group CEO Mark Okerstrom is one of the travel industry's savviest players. It's fun to see him back at it, after a mostly quiet period of him settling into the company's top job.
Expedia Group said it had acquired two small startups — Pillow and ApartmentJet — which help owners of multifamily residential communities list and manage short-term rentals while complying with local regulations.
The companies did not disclose the terms of the deals. Pillow, a San Francisco-based startup, had raised $16 million in capital, including a $13.5 million Series A round last year led by venture capital firm Mayfield. ApartmentJet, a Chicago startup, had disclosed $1.2 million in funding, with Network Ventures and BlueTree as key backers.
Pillow offers online tools that enable multifamily building owners to access information about short-term rental guests and monitor which tenants are renting out which of their units. The company also helps resident hosts to comply with regulations, licenses, and taxes.
The startup, founded in 2013 originally as a property management service, pivoted a little over a year ago to residential service.
It has experimented with different commercial models. In one of these models, some te
