Airbnb Pricing Startup Beyond Pricing Raises $42M In Funding Round

Beyond Pricing, a startup that helps Airbnb users manage what to charge using an algorithm that calculates numerous factors, has raised $42 million in a funding round.

Beyond Pricing takes 1 percent of a booking in exchange for optimizing rates every day, TechCrunch reported.

The startup has been very popular, and has grown from covering 26 cities to 7,000, and from four employees to 60. It raised $1.5 million in its first round and then $2 million in 2016.

“We skipped a lot of intermediary funding,” Beyond Pricing CEO Ian McHenry said. “We wanted to have a capital partner that could help us take a few more risks and build out a bunch of new products and go after Europe in a big way since it’s over half of the whole market.”

The company has handled about $2 billion in bookings so far. It wants to use the new funding to continue to grow, and also to see if its algorithm would work for hotels with different types of rooms.

The platform works by looking for what similar homes charge and taking into account vacancy rates, hotel prices, historic prices and demand, as well as weather and airline info.

The company lets people have access to the same type of information hotels use when they’re pricing rooms. McHenry wants to expand the business to hotels so it can go beyond just king or twin room classifications, and offer prices for types of suites that offer different amenities.

McHenry is counting on Airbnb not completely taking over the vacation rental market, because the company thrives when it can pit services like VRBO and HomeAway against each other. McHenry, a former investment banker, said he really enjoys his work.

“I’m a huge data nerd. I love looking at numbers and trying to optimize things,” he said per the report. “If I had my druthers I’d end up just playing with the algorithms all day.”