Stay in Someone's Home for Free – $125M Says That Model Works

01 /The Concept

Kindred recently disclosed two funding rounds simultaneously: $40M raised in January of last year, and $85M closed just days ago. One of the investors in the earlier round was the co-founder and CEO of Figma.

Since its founding in 2021, the company had raised only $22.8M across two rounds – including one that was [covered here](/review/snimi-kvartiru-za-nol-dollarov). The scale of these new rounds signals a different level of ambition.

Kindred is a home exchange platform. Members stay in someone else's home while that home's owner is away – ideally, because the owner is staying in *someone else's* home at the same time.

Every night a homeowner hosts a guest, they earn one Kindred credit. Every night they stay elsewhere as a guest, they spend one credit. Money can't buy credits – the only way to get them is to offer your home in return.

In theory, that makes travel accommodation essentially free. In practice, Kindred charges a service fee per night plus a cleaning fee. Average all-in costs run $20–45 per night, though in expensive cities like New York they can reach $100. Even so, that's typically 3–5x cheaper than a comparable hotel or short-term rental.

Joining requires an online interview with the Kindred team. When a member requests to stay at a specific home, they also go through a video call with the homeowner – who can decline the request. Homeowners decide who gets in.

Kindred provides up to $100,000 in property protection coverage during guest stays, with what it describes as a straightforward claims process if anything goes wrong.

A concierge service helps homeowners prepare for incoming guests and coordinates cleaning before, during, and after stays.

The network currently includes more than 300,000 homes across North America and Europe.

02 /Why It Matters

Kindred's members are fundamentally different from Airbnb hosts. Airbnb's model attracts property investors who buy real estate specifically to rent it out short-term; 90% of Kindred's listings are primary residences. Owners furnish and maintain a home they actually live in – which typically means decor, condition, and overall quality that's several notches above what a professional short-term rental host provides.

Home exchange is a concept that's been around for decades, but it long remained a niche behavior. Kindred's CEO recently described the model as now crossing into mainstream territory as a "global trend."

One driver: travelers are increasingly focused on cost. Surveys of US and UK consumers show 61% naming "affordability" as their top criterion when planning trips. Kindred delivers on that directly, often by a factor of 3–5x versus alternatives.

That growth is showing up in the numbers. Kindred's revenue grew 7x in the past year. In 2025, members booked 250,000 nights on the platform.

An interesting data point: nearly 75% of the population knows what home exchange is – but only about 10% have tried it in any form.

That gap can be read as discouraging. Or it can be read as a runway. Many sharing economy platforms – BlaBlaCar is a good example – saw slow early adoption before hitting a cultural tipping point that unlocked rapid growth.

For Kindred, that tipping point may come sooner rather than later. Traditional short-term rental models face increasing regulatory pressure: New York effectively banned whole-home short-term rentals to non-present owners in late 2023, and Barcelona has announced plans to prohibit all short-term private apartment rentals by 2028.

03 /Opportunities

Widespread internet connectivity and digital identity are making people's behavior more transparent – to other individuals and to institutions alike.

For some that's unsettling. But it has an unexpected positive consequence: rising transparency strengthens the trust infrastructure that sharing economy models depend on. It's increasingly hard to behave badly and then disappear.

The broader trend: sharing economy business models are gaining ground because they help people save money – which, as Kindred's growth illustrates, is a powerful and durable motivation.

That means models that failed to gain traction in earlier years deserve another look. The conditions that made them impractical are changing. What sharing economy concept would you want to try building now?