Hopper is a mobile-first travel booking app that began with web‑crawling and flight‑price prediction technology and now sells flights, hotels, homes and rental cars. The company offers differentiated features such as airfare price freezes, “cancel for any reason” and flight disruption guarantees; Hopper says price freezes represent about 40% of its app revenue. Hopper has expanded into B2B with Hopper Cloud, a white‑label program now comprising more than 40% of its business, and it powers products like Capital One Travel and the Premier Collection. The company is pushing social commerce (referrals, share‑to‑earn, team buying and daily gift) and says international sales rose from under 3% to over 20% of sales. Hopper reports more than 80 million downloads, expects platform sales to exceed $4.5 billion this year, employs about 1,500 people, and claims roughly 11.2% of the U.S. third‑party air travel market. Management has said the company plans to eventually go public; Hopper was last reported at a $5 billion valuation earlier this year. Hopper started as an app-focused air and hotel booking platform and has expanded into vacation rentals and fintech-style insurance products. It enables consumers to freeze airfare or hotel prices for a fee and distributes these services through partners such as Kayak, Capital One, MakeMyTrip, and Trip.com Group. The company says more than 70% of its airfare revenue now comes from those fintech services, and it reports North American flight market share in December was 300% higher than pre-pandemic. Hopper has about 2 million vacation rentals on its platform via partnerships and is hiring developers to transition from app-only to desktop. Management says it is building out Hopper Cloud and iterating fintech capabilities, and plans a cancel-for-any-reason feature that has not yet launched. The company is funneling profits back into marketing to accelerate growth. Hopper operates an AI-powered travel booking platform and fintech suite that offers protections against pricing fluctuations, no-hassle rebooking and cross-airline rebooking for missed connections. Its fintech products include Cancel for Any Reason, Change for Any Reason and a Rebooking Guarantee. The company says revenue is on track to surge 330% year-over-year and is already up 100% versus its last pre-pandemic quarter. Hopper has raised nearly $600M to date and recently closed a new $175M Series G. The company will use proceeds to scale customer support (it has already grown the team 200% and deployed automation resolving 60% of inbound requests) and plans to hire 500 people, including 300 in customer service. It is pursuing acqui-hires focused on travel, data science and engineering, plans to add home rentals to its product set, and aims to expand into Europe and Asia. Hopper is also white-labeling booking products through Hopper Cloud and partnering with Capital One and Amadeus to distribute its fintech booking tools. Hopper is a mobile-only travel booking app that uses artificial intelligence to help users search for and book hotels and flights directly in-app as an OTA, earning commissions on bookings. The company builds user profiles and lookalike models to recommend trips, and reports that 25% of its bookings are driven by AI-generated suggestions with conversion rates 2.6x higher than explicit searches. Hopper has passed 30 million installs and 75 million trips planned, and says it’s on track for nearly $1 billion in sales this year. The company is not currently profitable, reinvesting returns to fuel growth. Hopper plans to use the new funding to further develop its AI algorithms and expand deeper into international markets, having recently added 47 low-cost carriers in Europe and boosted regional sales by 154% year-over-year. While it may consider alternate accommodations later, its immediate focus is scaling hotel supply and its mobile product. Hopper is a mobile-only airfare price-prediction and booking app whose forecasting software claims up to 95% accuracy a year in advance. The app combines price-forecast models with push notifications to convert users into buyers. Downloads grew from 1 million to over 10 million in a year, with more than 1 million installs per month and 18 million trips tracked. Hopper says sales grew 23x year-over-year and it is selling roughly $1 million in flights per day. The app sends over 20 million notifications monthly and reports that 90% of bookings come from those alerts. Hopper plans to continue international expansion (currently selling tickets in 126 countries) and to grow headcount from 40 to 120 employees in Montreal and Cambridge by the end of next year.

Total raised

$468M

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Nov 2022