Airbnb Will Acquire Background Check Startup Trooly To Fight Against Scammers

The vacation rental service Airbnb has expanded into a lot of areas within the past few years. Now, the company’s latest acquisition will help bolster its behind-the-scenes abilities. Airbnb has purchased background check startup Trooly, Bloomberg reported.

It’s not the first time Airbnb and Trooly have worked together. As Bloomberg noted, Airbnb has previously worked with Trooly to power its own security and background check tools to prevent bad users from joining the service. The rental company already uses its own verification identity process to ensure accounts are made and tied to actual people, but by bringing Trooly in-house, Airbnb likely wants to develop its own security and background check tools further.

Read: Who Ends Up Paying For The Gig Economy?

As a niche startup, Trooly has maintained a relatively modest profile. The company uses machine learning and other resources to draw from public data and records to analyze user behavior. Trooly was founded in 2014 and raised $10 million in funding last year. Terms of the deal were not made public, but it is expected to be formally announced Monday.

Trooly CEO and co-founder Savi Baveja told TechCrunch last year the company’s model comes from streamlining and taking a smarter approach to identity verification and checks.

“Background checks are very labor based, people based,” Baveja told TechCrunch. “It’s literally physical court runners that are going out to courthouses to look at records. So typically, the way we’re being used in a background check mode is as a triage before sending someone to the courthouse.

“If we can probabilistically say here’s a person or business who is extremely unlikely to fail a background check … that’s worth a lot to our customers. Because then they can make a positive decision much earlier.”

For Airbnb, the company hopes that the startup can improve its own fraud detection abilities. Bloomberg noted Airbnb has struggled to deal with problems like fraudulent listings and users who try to contact Airbnb owners directly about rentals to avoid going through Airbnb.

Read: Airbnb: No IPO Plans Yet, But Possible In 2018

The acquisition comes as Airbnb looks to expand its resources and scale as a company. Last year, the company acquired high-end vacation service Luxury Retreats and also launched its Trips program for booking curated local events. The home rental company is also attempting to plan its next steps. With around 3 million active listings, the company has an estimated valuation of $31 billion and hit profitability last year.

While companies like Spotify and Snapchat are either exploring an initial public offering or have already entered the market, Airbnb may take a more deliberate path in its next stages. At a talk earlier this year at the New York Stock Exchange via CNBC, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company would do its due diligence if it wants to go public.

"We are working on making sure the company is ready to go public, and I've said it was a two-year project," Chesky said. "We're probably about halfway through that project, as far as just being ready to go public. But at that point, our investors are very patient. None of them are anxiously waiting for us to go public."