Against all the odds of just a few months ago, Airbnb has submitted a draft registration statement to list for the first time on the public financial markets.
The private accommodation and home-sharing pioneer logged the confidential details of its offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday (August 20).
The number of shares to be offered to the markets and price range have not been determined, the company says in a statement.
Airbnb will be following the route of a traditional IPO - rather than the predicted direct listing - over the course of the next few months.
The question of when Airbnb would move towards its long-awaited IPO has followed the company long before the coronavirus pandemic hit the industry in early-2020.
It September 2019 the company confirmed it would end a two-year period of rapid strategic expansion - and continual speculation about its position as a private company - with an intention to list on the public markets in 2020.
That strategy looked to have fallen by the wayside as the first quarter of 2020 came to a close with the travel industry on its knees amid the onset of pandemic-led lockdowns across large swathes of the world.
The company quickly enlisted the help of the financial sector to shore up the business as it braced for what was likely to be a turbulent few quarters ahead of it.
In April, Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners invested $1 billion to help mitigate the fallout from the COVID-19 onslaught.
The funds - a combination of debt and equity securities - would be used to invest in Airbnb’s community of hosts and enable the company to “be in the strongest possible position as travel rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic,” the company said at the time.
It also secured a $1 billion syndicated term loan, in a bid to shore up its financial defenses amid the outbreak.
Still, a month later, 25% of the company's staff were laid off (1,900 out of 7,500) as CEO Chesky forecast that revenues for the business would be less than half of those in 2019.
Changes to the business were also put in place, including a pause of its efforts in transportation and in Airbnb Studios. The company would also scale back investments in its Hotels and Lux categories.
The first hint that Chesky and co were still eyeing the 2020 IPO strategy came in a carefully structured interview with CNBC in late-June.
"We spent 12 years building Airbnb's business and lost almost all of it in the matter of four to six weeks," Chesky said at the time.
His reflection on how bad things got in March for Airbnb ("travel as we knew it, is over - and it's never coming back") was countered by how the business was already looking to capture the market in the months ahead, centered on how local destinations would come into play for travelers in the short to medium term, plus changes to how people work from home - or from any home, as he put it.
If the industry and the business recovered "a bit", an IPO was not off the table, he said.
The company has taken in almost $5.5 billion in funding over the course of 16 rounds since its creation in 2008.