Airbnb Reveals New Details of Chesky’s Secretive AI Startup

Airbnb on Thursday shed new light on a secretive AI startup that founder and CEO Brian Chesky controls, saying the company has reached an agreement that could allow it to invest in the startup and license its technology. Chesky has so far self-funded the AI lab and plans to continue financing it, according to a person with knowledge of his plans.

The new details, some of which were disclosed in a securities filing after Airbnb’s quarterly report, involve a startup Chesky has kept in stealth mode for much of the last year as he continues to run the short-term rental site he founded nearly two decades ago. Airbnb Chief Technology Officer Ahmad Al-Dahle, who joined Airbnb in January after running aspects of Meta’s AI organization, has been advising the startup.

Chesky has a controlling interest in the startup while Al-Dahle also owns equity in it, the filing said. Chesky, who owns about 10% of Airbnb but controls around a third of the company’s voting power, has a net worth of nearly $12 billion, according to Forbes. The startup has office space, a third person said.

The startup has incorporated under the name Kaboodle Labs in San Francisco, according to a California filing, but that name is a placeholder, said the person with knowledge.

Chesky’s involvement in the business echoes the moves of other seasoned technology founders who have created their own AI startups over the past year. Last November, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launched AI engineering and manufacturing startup Prometheus. Former Airtable CEO Howie Liu is running a new AI agent startup called Hyperagent that originally started within Airtable, the database app sold to Bending Spoons in September.

But few CEOs of large public companies—with the exception of Tesla’s Elon Musk, Block’s Jack Dorsey and Apple’s Steve Jobs—have managed to run multiple companies at once, and shareholders in these companies have sometimes complained that the CEOs’ attention was spread too thin.

Airbnb in the filing said the roles of Chesky and Al-Dahle “do not change their duties and responsibilities to Airbnb, and they continue to devote the time and attention necessary to fulfill those responsibilities.”

Though Chesky plans to fund the AI lab with his own capital for now, it’s possible that the intense need for capital for AI startups, either to get access to talent or AI chips, could push it to eventually take outside funding. Startups that train their own models, otherwise known as neolabs, have been raising billions of dollars within just a few years of launching.

Bloomberg in June reported that Chesky planned to start a new company.

In Thursday’s disclosure, Airbnb also said the new AI lab had acquired certain intellectual property from Airbnb and reimbursed it for certain expenses in exchange for $7.1 million in cash. The nature of the IP couldn’t be learned.

Chesky co-founded Airbnb in 2007 with Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk. The trio led the company through a period of regulatory pushback, near-shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, a blockbuster initial public offering and then a surge in revenue as travel resumed.

When growth slowed in recent years, Chesky pursued a variety of paths to reinvent the company—for example, by offering travel experiences like tours. More recently he hired Al-Dahle to focus on using AI in Airbnb’s operations, including through AI-powered customer service and travel agents.

While Airbnb has had a long relationship with OpenAI, Chesky has also advocated for using open-source models to cut costs, saying some like Alibaba’s Qwen can be “faster and cheaper” for many queries. Airbnb on Wednesday said it had fine-tuned a small, open-source AI model using Airbnb-specific data, allowing the company to detect potential violations of its pricing and payment transparency policies faster and at a fraction of the cost of larger AI models.

Al-Dahle oversaw Meta’s generative AI team, formed in 2023. He left early this year after a series of restructurings of Meta’s AI labs, including one following Meta’s partial acquisition of Scale AI and the appointment of Scale co-founder Alexandr Wang, who co-leads the organization.

Jemima McEvoy and Phoebe Liu contributed to this report.

Stephanie Palazzolo is a reporter at The Information covering artificial intelligence. She previously worked at Business Insider covering AI and at Morgan Stanley as an investment banker. Based in New York, she can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @steph_palazzolo.

Aaron Tilley is a reporter covering Apple at The Information. He previously covered Apple and Microsoft for The Wall Street Journal. He started his career covering semiconductors and hardware at Forbes. He lives in Oakland and can be reached at aarontilley.62 on Signal, [email protected] and at @aatilley on X.

Jyoti Mann is a reporter covering Meta Platforms for The Information. Contact her via a nonwork device at [email protected] and @jyotimann.11 on Signal.