Montreal’s Hopper To Hire 500 After Raising $175 Million

Montréal’s Hopper has raised a $175 million Series G financing round led by New York’s GPI Capital, as it looks to capitalize on growing demand for its travel app. The round also included Glade Brook Capital, WestCap, Goldman Sachs Growth and Accomplice.

As the travel industry continues to rebound, Hopper has demonstrated significant outperformance with its category-leading mobile-only marketplace, delivering value to customers and supply partners with the company’s proprietary suite of fintech offerings.

Hopper has over 60 million downloads, consistently ranks as one of the most downloaded travel apps, and now has a larger air travel market share in North America than it did before the pandemic along with a growing suite of API-enabled solutions for its B2B initiative.

Based on its current run rate, Hopper is pacing towards 330% revenue growth compared to last year and it has already surpassed its pre-pandemic revenue peak from Q1 2020 by over 100%. Product roll-outs have been delivered over an increasingly diversified mix of air, hotel and car rental bookings with the company’s fintech offerings now representing a majority of its revenue.

Whether it’s pricing volatility or avoiding trip disruptions, Hopper’s fintech offerings aim to address every pain point in the customer journey while driving conversion, repeat purchases, and profitability.

Earlier in the year, Hopper announced that it was launching a B2B initiative called Hopper Cloud. Through this partnership program, any travel provider – airlines, online travel agencies, meta-search companies, travel agencies, etc. – can integrate and seamlessly distribute Hopper’s fintech or agency content.

Following a year of unprecedented customer support requests, Hopper has scaled its customer support team by 200% and developed several self-serve automation tools so that 60% of customer support requests are now resolved instantly.

The new funds will be used to hire an additional 500 employees, of which 300 of them are focused on customer service.

The company is actively looking to acqui-hire other teams in travel, data science, or engineering-heavy startups to introduce new product offerings and fuel international expansion. Hopper has had recent success integrating the teams of Journy and Mowgli, which will accelerate entry into new travel categories such as home rentals and regional expansion to Europe.