Sonder

Proptech/hospitalityUSA

New to Unitard

💀 Dead / Bankrupt

Peak $2.2 BillionToday

~-99%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2019
📈
Peak valuation
$2.2 Billion ’22
💔
Became a Unitard
Nov 2025
💸
Last valuation
Wiped out

Capital raised

$680M

Total raised

$164K/day

Raised per day

Total raised averaged per day over approximately 11.4 years from founding to bankruptcy or shutdown. This is not measured cash burn. Methodology

Funding: Skift/Wikipedia

Current status

Chapter 7 liquidation (Nov 2025)

The rise & fall

7 moments · 2014–2025

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2014

Founded in Montreal

Francis Davidson turns a college-apartment subletting hustle into Sonder: leased apartments run like boutique hotels.

Wikipedia

2019

Joins the unicorn club

A Series D values the apartment-hotel operator above $1B.

TechCrunch

Jan 2022

The peak: a $2.2B SPAC debut$2.2B

Lists via SPAC in January 2022 — straight into the teeth of the SPAC bust.

SEC filing

2022–24

The post-listing bleed

Persistent losses and a brutal slide leave the stock near worthless.

SEC filing

2024

The Marriott lifeline

A 20-year licensing deal folds Sonder's apartments into Marriott's system — the survival plan.

Skift

2021–25

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021–25

Staff braced for years — Glassdoor reviews counted layoffs roughly every six months from 2021 on — but the end was still abrupt: reviewers described some 1,400 people let go mid-shift, many learning from the news, promised severance never arriving.

Nov 2025

Chapter 7 — joins the Unitard Club 💔

Marriott terminates the 20-year deal and Sonder files to liquidate; roughly $680M raised over a decade, gone.

SEC filing

$2.18Bof peak value erased · 11 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Sonder leased apartments and ran them as tech-enabled short-term rentals, debuting via SPAC at roughly a $2.2B market cap in January 2022. A brutal post-listing slide and persistent losses left it near worthless; after Marriott terminated a 20-year licensing deal, Sonder filed for Chapter 7 liquidation in November 2025.

Source: SEC filings; SPAC debut Jan 2022