Airbnb is close to rounding up funding that will value the company at $10 billion, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Airbnb is expected to go public this year in some speculation, though not according to Brian Chesky. Earlier this week, Mark Cuban broke down how the process works:
What Silicon Valley does better than anyone is create exits. They know how to get people who they have made money for to turn over a lot of that money to buy the companies they have invested in. They know how to put on a show to get a company to an IPO. They know how to go out and get hundreds of millions of dollars to bridge companies with 10s of millions in revenues to their IPO and more importantly to make sure the IPO happens.
Chesky told Fast Company he wants it to function more like a hotel:
Chesky has decided that Airbnb will become nothing less than a full-blown hospitality brand, one that delivers a seamless end-to-end experience when its customers travel. "If you ask Brian now what drives Airbnb's growth, it's not that people want to get a cheaper space," says Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, an early investor. "Airbnb could've spread out horizontally into the sharing of power tools and cars and stuff like that. But Brian has decided the growth is in hospitality."
Chesky told the Wall Street Journal that Airbnb is not going to IPO this year, and the speculative article linked above was about how more tech companies are opting for "stealth IPOs".
"Mr. Chesky said that an initial public offering was not in the works for 2014. 'We are not going public this year. We will do it at a time when it benefits the company. When we have a good reason.'"
Either way, Airbnb has quite a bright future ahead of them.