10 Little Known Billion Dollar Businesses

By siliconindia | Tuesday, 04 February 2014, 13:14 Hrs

Airbnb

Valued At: $2.5billion

Founders: Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk

Established: 2008

Airbnb provides an online platform for rent seekers and hosts to connect and do business. The users called ‘hosts’ need to have a profile on Airbnb giving details of the property they intend to rent. The property registered for rent on Airbnb varies from private rooms to boats. In 2013, Airbnb has 5,00,000 listings across 192 countries.

Stripe

Valued At: $1.8billion

Founders: Patrick Collison, John Collisson

Established: 2010

Stripe was founded with an aim of facilitating smooth online transactions. Stripe’s investors include, Sequoia Capital, the founders of PayPal and Andreessen Horowitz. Stripe charges 2.9 percent for each successful transaction. It allows the users to make payment through its mobile app.

Pure Storage

Valued At: $1billion

Founders: John Colgrove, John Hayes

Established: 2009

Pure Storage is into data storage business. They have developed all flash enterprise arrays that provide high speed performance. They specialize in enterprise storage, desktop virtualization, data storage and cloud computing among other things. Pure Storage was declared the silver winner in Technology Innovation Award 2012 by the Wall Street Journal.