Clearly, the downturn hasn’t disappointed investors in the travel industry. Travel booking startup Hopper today announced the closing of a $96 million follow-on investment from Capital One, bringing the company’s total raised to nearly $730 million. The new money will be used for several efforts, CEO and founder Frederic Lalonde said in a press release, including supporting Hopper’s new social business venture.
As part of the funding, Hopper said it is extending its partnership with Capital One (which heads Hopper’s Series F) to create new travel products aimed at Capital One customers. Hopper’s technology already powers Capital One Travel and Premier Collection, Capital One’s marketplace of hotels and resorts exclusively for Capital One Venture X cardholders. It’s a safe bet that similar experiences will follow in that vein.
“In Hopper, we’ve found a partner who can not only match that momentum, but help us take a different approach to challenging the status quo and building a world-class travel brand,” Capital One Managing VP Matt Kneiss said in a statement. . “With this strategic partnership, we are well-positioned to adapt to the rapidly changing travel environment and create industry-leading solutions for our customers in their travel journeys.”
In the year Founded in 2007 by Frédéric Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk, Hopper spent six years secretly building what it then claimed was “the world’s largest structured travel information database”. The company’s web technology takes blogs, photo-sharing sites and other sources of information about places and geo-locates them in a large database. But after Hopper’s official debut in 2014, company leadership decided to shift its engineering resources to mobile and flight forecasting, building a device that would continuously monitor airline prices and send push notifications of price change alerts.
Hopper has evolved into one of the largest travel apps in North America, with more than 80 million downloads and more than $4.5 billion in sales for flights, hotels, accommodations and rental cars this year. Hopper differentiates itself from competing travel services (e.g. Travelocity) with guarantees such as airfares and flight disruptions, which the company has previously said represent about 40% of the app’s total revenue.
Last year, Hopper entered the business-to-business market with the launch of Hopper Cloud, a partnership program that allows travel suppliers including Kayak, Marriott and Trip.com to sell Hopper’s fintech and travel agency products through a white label portal. Hopper Cloud says it has seen rapid uptake, now comprising more than 40% of Hopper’s business. Lalonde says Hopper Cloud is on track to do more by 2022 than all the hoppers combined last year.
On the consumer side, this spring, Hopper shifted its focus to in-app promotions, discounts and sales events. Social commerce is the company’s next big push, with things like referrals, earning, group buying and a daily giveaway that rewards users with discounts on travel purchases they launch the app and share with friends.
Hopper was last valued at $5 billion, TechCrunch reported in early February. The company – which accounts for an estimated 11.2% of the third-party air travel market in the US – plans to eventually go public.
