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Jackie Fertitta, left, Frank Timons and LeAnne Schweitzer of Pier 88 Investment Partners, a small hedge fund in San Francisco that was founded in 2013.Credit Peter Earl McCollough for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Airbnb’s valuation has ballooned over the last few years as large financial firms like Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price have rushed to invest in the start-up. But a small San Francisco-based hedge fund called Pier 88 Investment Partners has decided that the fervor for Airbnb shares creates a different kind of opportunity.

While other investors paid dearly to buy a piece of Airbnb — the start-up’s latest funding round valued it at $24 billion — Pier 88 did not invest directly in the privately held online home-rental company. Instead, Pier 88 put money into HomeAway, a publicly traded Internet company that competes with Airbnb, but has a market capitalization of just $2.95 billion.

Frank Timons and LeAnne Schweitzer, the co-founders of Pier 88, believe there is money to be made on this big gap between public and private company valuations. In their view, the public companies are such relative bargains that they will make great acquisitions for purchasers that want to better compete with upstarts like Airbnb. Then, when those publicly traded companies are snapped up — often for a premium of more than 50 percent — Pier 88 can profit from the bet.

“People think there’s something inherently wrong with public assets because they’re cheaper,” Mr. Timons said. “But if I’m buying decent assets at a relative discount to the private marketplace, the risk-reward is probably in my favor.”

Pier 88 is an example of how some investors are trying to take advantage of the current start-up boom without directly investing in the start-ups themselves. While venture capitalists and large investors like Fidelity, BlackRock and Tiger Global have the deep pockets and connections to buy into start-ups, many other investors have neither the capital nor contacts to get a chunk of popular companies like Airbnb, Uber and Snapchat. As a result, they are coming up with roundabout ways to get a piece of the action.

For Pier 88, the growing valuation gap between start-up and publicly traded companies makes some stocks seem like even better bargains for buyers, and there is an increasing number of such disparities to bet on. So much money has been poured into fast-growing technology start-ups in the last few years that there is now a herd of “unicorns,” the privately held companies valued at more than $1 billion, and “decacorns,” which are valued at more than $10 billion.

Some of these elite start-ups are now vastly more expensive than their publicly traded cousins. Apart from Airbnb being pegged at eight times the value of HomeAway, the ride-hailing start-up Uber was recently valued at around $51 billion, compared with $7.3 billion for the rental-car company Hertz. The storage start-up Dropbox has a valuation of around $10 billion, while its publicly traded rival Box has a $1.9 billion market capitalization.

It’s not perfectly accurate to directly compare market capitalization and private company valuations, since private companies keep their true financial pictures hidden.

Still, “the easy private financing environment has created an interesting trade opportunity,” said Kenneth J. Heinz, the president of Hedge Fund Research, which tracks hedge funds and their performance. “With such a disparity between public and private multiples, it’s a reasonable fundamental approach to believe that in this environment, the public company valuation will come up or the company will be acquired.”

The last time so many private companies were more expensive than their public company counterparts was in the late-1990s dot-com bubble, said David Walrod, a former partner at the venture capital firm Oak Investment Partners who sits on Pier 88’s board. After that bubble turned into a bust, investors placed more value on the fact that publicly traded shares are easy to sell and that the companies disclose detailed financial information.

Mr. Walrod added that he was not as worried about the big valuation gaps this time around because the new boom is spurred by structural factors like low interest rates and lots of venture money, and many unicorn companies have legitimate businesses.

Mr. Timons, 46, and Ms. Schweitzer, 32, got to know each other when they worked at the mutual fund firm Lord Abbett in 2012. They started Pier 88 in October 2013, naming the firm after a pier in Lake Geneva, Wis., where Mr. Timons’s family has a summer house. Today, they work on the fifth floor of an office complex in San Francisco, hidden behind cubicles of start-up engineers and the abandoned showroom of a former landscape architecture firm. Bags of snacks are stowed away on a shelf next to finance books and company annual reports.

The co-founders set up their fund to invest in publicly traded tech and health care companies that will eventually be acquired by buyers seeking innovation, with the private valuation boom just one factor that could spur an acquisition.

In the 22 months that Pier 88 has been in business, seven companies it has invested in have been acquired. Those include the email marketing company Responsys, which was purchased by Oracle, and the software firm Informatica, which was bought by the private equity firm Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

Pier 88 returned 8.9 percent in the first six months of the year, according to the firm, while the HFRI Technology/Healthcare hedge fund index rose 9.1 percent. Since inception, the fund has returned 19.4 percent, compared with 22.7 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

Pier 88 said its investing strategy required patience since it took time for its holdings to rally or be acquired. The firm’s first group of investors agreed to have their money locked up in the fund for three years so that Pier 88 would have time for its strategy to work. For those investors, the firm charges no management fee and a 10 percent performance fee.

Ms. Schweitzer said the three-year lockup period also lets her firm invest with a longer horizon than the average hedge fund, an approach that can create a lot of ups and downs. Reid Sanders, a Pier 88 board member who founded the $29 billion mutual fund firm Southeastern Asset Management, thinks about it this way: “Private valuations are really all over the place, too, but there’s just no daily price quote to make you sick to your stomach.”

In addition to HomeAway, Pier 88 has shares of the collaboration software maker Jive, which has a $292 million market capitalization versus a $2.8 billion valuation for its fast-growing private competitor Slack. The firm also owns shares of Pandora, the online radio company whose $3.8 billion market capitalization is less than half the $8.5 billion valuation of privately held Spotify.

“These companies aren’t perfectly analogous with their private counterparts, but we’re looking at neighborhoods to find assets that could be useful to lots of different companies,” Mr. Timons said. “Pandora could make a nice fit in a media or Internet company. Jive could be a nice tuck-in for a big enterprise company or, given its huge cash balance sheet, it would be a great private equity target.”