Creating a world where everyone has a home away from home.
4stay is an online marketplace connecting students, interns, and remote workers with verified hosts, room providers, and roommates near their destinations — so finding a place to land feels less like a gamble, and more like coming home.
- Founded
- June 2017
- Headquarters
- McLean, VA · USA
- Stage
- Venture-backed · Series
- Footprint
- 38 cities · 3 continents
By the numbers, since the very first stay.
The hard way first — offline, one student at a time — then online. Numbers grow; the way we treat each guest doesn't.
Students placed before we wrote a single line of code
Campuses, language schools & institutional partners
Cities across the US, Canada & Europe
Countries of origin represented in our guest community
Our story
It started with two students who couldn't find a place to live.
In 2007 and 2008, our founders Akobir and Faridun came to the United States to pursue their education. Finding housing was the hardest part of the journey. Hundreds of thousands of students still face the same wall today.
Replace with hero portrait — diptych, natural light, McLean office.
The first ten thousand stays happened offline.
Dorms were full or too expensive. Apartment managers wanted a one-year lease and a US credit history that international students simply don't have. Classified-ad sites weren't safe. Off-campus roommate matching was, in a word, a disaster.
So Akobir and Faridun did it the hard way — picking up the phone, walking neighborhoods, vouching personally for each guest and each host. By the time 4stay had a website, the founding team had already helped more than 10,000 students across 15 states and 30+ countries find a place to live.
"We exist to better the lives of as many students as possible by offering affordable homes."
In June 2017, we launched 4stay as an online marketplace so we could help even more students at scale — backed by the same Silicon Valley investors who backed Dropbox, PayPal, and LendingClub. Today we're a high-growth, venture-backed startup, but the operating principle hasn't changed since 2007: treat every stay like it's your friend's first night in a new country.
Mission & Vision
Two sentences we keep on the wall.
Our Vision
To create a world where everyone has a home away from home.
For the international student stepping off a 14-hour flight. For the intern starting a 12-week rotation in a city they've never visited. For the remote professional moving every few months. Home shouldn't depend on your passport.
Our Mission
To build a trustworthy, medium-to-long-term housing platform anywhere in the world.
Verified hosts. Verified guests. No SSN walls. No surprise broker fees. No twelve-month leases for a four-month stay. Just a clean, honest market for stays that last weeks and months — not nights, not years.
Operating principles
Five values we hire, fire, and decide by.
We work in cross-functional, T-shaped teams — everyone deep in one craft, willing to step into others. These five lines tell us how to behave when nobody's watching.
Believe in the work.
Believe in the vision, the mission, the team, the community — and most importantly, in yourself. The rest follows.
Go further to see the light.
Plan well, execute fast, learn from it. Then do it again, sharper. Speed without reflection is just motion.
Help others first.
Reap happiness and success when you selflessly help the people around you. Hosts, guests, teammates — same rule.
Ask "Why?" — often.
Be innovative. Question the way things have always been done. The best ideas live one "why" deeper than the obvious answer.
Embrace the rollercoaster.
The world and technology move fast. Tomorrow won't look like today. Buckle in, hands up, and enjoy it.
The team
Together, everyone achieves more.
Great companies are built by great teams that stay close to the customer. Ours spans product, engineering, real estate, partnerships, and customer service — across three time zones, on a first-name basis with hundreds of hosts.
AkobirCo-founder
Co-founder & Chief Marketplace Officer
FaridunCo-founder
Co-founder & CEO
Vasily
Chief Technology Officer
Andrea
Chief Operating Officer
Kristina
Head of Account Management
Bakhtiyor "Bob"
VP, Institutional Relations & Partnerships
Chris
VP of Product
Salim
Sr. VP of Real Estate
Chris
Chief Financial Officer
Juan
Head of Customer Service
Rockstar Advisors
The wisest people learn from others' successes. We're lucky to have a board of operators and investors who've been there before.
Jen O'Neal
Co-founder of Tripping.com
Dr. Clinton
CEO of Cultural Vistas
Sam Meek
CEO of Sandboxx
Jason Fudin
CEO of Placemakr
John Fanguy
Serial investor & operator
Dr. Shank
President Emeritus, Marymount University
Investors
Backed by the people who backed Dropbox, PayPal, and LendingClub.
A high-growth, venture-backed startup funded by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and industry experts who've built marketplaces before — and who understand long-stay housing as deeply as we do.
Interested in joining our cap table? We open allocation rounds for strategic LPs and operators who can help us reach the next million stays.
Become an investorIn the press
Featured in stories about how student housing is being reinvented.
Reporters keep coming back to the same question: why is finding a room as a student in 2026 still this hard? We're glad they're asking. Here's a sample of where we've shown up.
"Millennials are reinventing student living — and 4stay is rewriting the playbook on long-stay rentals."
"A marketplace built for the 1.1 million international students who can't sign a US lease."
"From offline matchmaking to a venture-backed platform — 4stay's unusual founder story."
"The medium-stay market is the missing middle of housing. 4stay is building the rails for it."
Join us
We're hiring people who want to ship, not just talk about shipping.
4stay is all about people. We have an individual approach to selecting candidates with a startup background. If you're customer-obsessed, growth-oriented, and excited by the rollercoaster — we'd love to meet you.