Hopper Raises $61 Million to Make Travel Cheap
Hopper, a Montreal-born airfare prediction app, has raised $82 million CAD in a new funding round, bringing the startup’s total funding to more than $100 million.
The Series C round was led by pension fund manager Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and included participation from existing investors, Brightspark Ventures, OMERS, and BDC Capital IT Venture Fund, among others.
With more than 10 million downloads in a year, most of them recently, Hopper’s growth trajectory is impressive. Hopper was founded in 2007, the idea was to build a travel planning and discovery site that would aggregate all the best travel-related content on the internet and make it easily searchable. When the site launched in early 2014, though, it didn’t get the expected traction.
But among the data that Hopper had gathered was information on over a billion flights. It gave Hopper insight into the best times to buy plane tickets. Now the company’s bread and butter is forecasting software: Hopper claims it can predict future flight prices up to a year in advance with 95% accuracy.
“The fundamental growth is what we’re excited about,” Frederic Lalonde, the company’s co-founder and CEO, says. “We’ve started to trend up internationally.”
Hopper says it will uses the flush of capital to expand from more than 100 countries to nearly 150 and triple its workforce from 40 to 120.
After ‘Brutal’ Pivot, Travel Startup Hopper Finds Traction on Mobile
