Ashton Kutcher Invests in Airbnb

According to an announcement posted to the Airbnb blog, Ashton Kutcher, star of television programs

and

and films such as

, has made a "significant investment" in Airbnb.com. He also will join the team of this San Francisco-based vacation rental startup as a strategic advisor. In addition to his Hollywood profile, Kutcher has been keeping up one of the world's most popular Twitter accounts. And he has invested in a number of successful tech startups, such as SeatGeek, Hipmunk, Flipboard, Foursquare and Skype, which recently was acquired by Microsoft

for $8.75 billion. Airbnb's site allows users to book privately-owned spaces, such as a couch, a room or a house, in the same way one would book a hotel room online. Airbnb users have made more than a million reservations from some 60,000 listings across the United States and Europe. The company had already built up a customer base and raised $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners. But with Kutcher's name attached, Airbnb may get the push it needs to become the go-to place for vacation rentals and to knock off imitator sites that have cropped up. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.