Travelers have generally had to choose between booking traditional hotel rooms and renting short-term accommodations through platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo.
But both models can be pricy, and each has its own downsides. Hotel rooms often lack amenities like dedicated workspaces and cooking facilities, and they’re typically concentrated in tourist areas or central business districts, while short-term home rentals require carefully understanding an individual property’s offerings and rules.
Kindred, a startup founded in 2021, aims to offer what it calls a third option, letting travelers offer their entire homes to other travelers when they are away, in turn receiving credits they can use to book another stay on the platform. Travelers pay only for cleaning, which Kindred can help hosts arrange, and a service fee to Kindred itself. (Members can alternatively a flat annual fee which covers unlimited service fees for a year, rather than pay Kindred as they go). Homes must meet minimum standards, verified through photos, and they’re required to be free of occupants when guests are booked, so there are no off-putting encounters with live-in hosts or bathrobe-clad roommates.
“We envisioned a way to travel that afforded more authentic experiences, was based in human connection, and really importantly, was radically more affordable than staying in a vacation rental or a hotel,” says Kindred cofounder and CEO Justine Palefsky, who says the company was inspired by her own experience plotting ad hoc home swaps with friends via spreadsheet.
[Photo: Kindred]
The platform, which in February announced it had raised $125 million across Series B and C funding rounds, claims more than 350,000 members across more than 150 cities. More than 90% of inventory on the platform is people’s primary residences, according to the company. And that means that while the company provides damage protection coverage and supplemental liability insurance—and requires hosts to carry their own homeowners or renters policies—members still need to have a certain level of trust in one another.
“It’s all about trust,” Palefsky says. “This only works if people are comfortable letting each other in to their real primary residence, and that’s a vulnerable thing to do.”
To both address trust concerns and help people connect with other members with shared affinities, Kindred is launching what it calls Circles—subgroups of users with something in common. An early example is a new Women Traveler Circle, which will let women and nonbinary users easily connect on the platform, share travel tips, and stay at one another’s homes.
[Photo: Kindred]
The idea for Circles came about after Kindred created a Slack community as a way to collect product feedback. The company soon noticed users were also using it to connect with people with whom they had something in common, like owning a dog or being parents of a toddler. Members expressed interest in swapping homes within those affinity groups, Palefsky says.
Kindred then launched an experiment with a pilot Circle dedicated to Google employees, since many employees of the company—which has offices in cities around the world—were already on the platform. Demand was high, with more than 2,000 people on a waiting list before the Circle launched, likely reflecting that people would be more comfortable letting someone else with the same employer stay at their home. After launching a Circle for Meta employees, Kindred worked to roll out the women’s Circle, which Palefsky hopes can help maximize members’ comfort, and assuage safety and other concerns some women have around staying in someone’s home and letting others stay in theirs.
“I think there is a kind of baseline mutual understanding around the safety, the sort of intuition, the mutual respect that women feel when sharing their spaces with each other,” she says.
As the company points out, women’s travel—including solo travel—has become a major part of the travel industry. Women’s solo travel accounted for more than half, or 54.6%, of solo travel revenue in 2025, according to research by Grand View Research cited by Kindred. And, as Palefsky points out, solo travelers in general often effectively pay more for trips, bearing the entire cost of things like accommodations and rental cars that would be split by groups or couples.
[Photo: Kindred]
“When you’re traveling solo, travel is even more expensive,” she says. “And home swapping is a way for women to stay in more comfortable accommodations without having to pay an arm and a leg to travel solo.”
In general, Kindred imposes minimum standards for homes listed on the platform, and provides guidelines for taking appealing photos and examples of locations that don’t meet their standards. Reasons given include lack of natural light, a primary bedroom with two twin beds instead of at least a full, and other issues. Bare mattresses and bare walls are not permitted. “Furniture is not cohesive & contemporary, no natural light,” reads one example of an ineligible home.
It’s easy to imagine that some members will be comforted by the fact that their Kindred guests must meet these standards for their own homes, which may indicate they’ll take better care of the places they’re staying. Similarly, the company is anticipating that with Circles, women may be more comfortable with other women as guests, and people may be more comfortable with employees of the same company staying in their home.
Home swapping may also be natural for employees of businesses with generous remote work policies. Members travel for a mix of vacation and other purposes, including many who wish to work remotely from another city, living in a local neighborhood as if it was their own, Palefsky says.
“We see a lot of people just using Kindred to experience what life would look like in a different city and try on a different identity, mixing in remote work to be able to fit more trips into their schedule without having to take too many vacation days,” she says.
The Circles program will enable more users to arrange to stay at homes of people with which they share some facets of their identity. The company expects to add more Circles later this year and may at some point enable users to create their own. Palefsky says she hopes Circles will help make more people comfortable with the idea of home swapping, and bring new members to the platform.
“The vast majority of our members have never done anything like this before,” she says. “So I think that the hope for Circles as a product is that this meaningfully reduces the friction for trying home swapping.”