HomeAway, the world’s leader in online vacation rentals, said it has secured $160 million in debt and equity financing to expand globally — including buying the U.S. “rent-by-owner” vacation rental website, VRBO.com (Vacation Rentals by Owner).
This is a huge amount of money, which suggests it wants to go public. The Austin, Texas company’s announcement is here.
This funding represents the largest financing of an Internet software and services company in the U.S. in 2006, the company said, citing Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ.
Existing investors Austin Ventures and Redpoint Ventures and new investors American Capital (ACAS), Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and Trident Capital provided the financing. Since being founded in February 2005, HomeAway has raised more than $200 million in capital and has quickly become the worldwide leader for vacation rentals on the Internet.
Tags: co:HomeAway, inv:American-Capital, inv:Austin-Ventures, inv:Institutional-Venture-Partners, inv:Redpoint-Ventures, inv:Trident-Capital2 Comments
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Vacation Rentals 2.0 said:
homeaway raises capital not for organic growth, just for acquiring existing websites such as vrbo.com. i dont think that business model is sustainable. other new websites such as Domegos Vacation Rentals 2.0 start to provide listing for property owners for free, according to web 2.0 style. homeaway is lagging behind and will lose ground soon or later to 2.0 providers
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Daniel said:
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article largest Internet funding this year, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
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3:30 am
TechCrunch en français » Coup de projecteur sur quelques startups françaises (épisode 2) said:
[...] Utile, toutes les annonces sont géo localisées. Antonio Queiroz le fondateur de La jeune société Bordelaise m’a confié qu’ils se sont inspirés des modèles américains comme Trulia ou encore HousingMaps et espèrent faire bouger un secteur peu innovant dominé par Abritel et Homelidays. La publication d’annonce est gratuite et le modèle repose sur l’intégration de publicités ou la mise en avant d’annonce. La société VacationValley est aussi présente dans le secteur. Et puis comme l’annonce est spéctaculaire mentionnons aussi HomeAway, le leader mondial du secteur, qui vient de lever 160 millions de dollars pour racheter son concurrent VRBO.com [...]