Former Expedia Employees Raise $8 Million For Travel Search Startup Hopper

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

hopper
hopper

Hopper, a Montreal, Canada-based startup, has raised $8 million in fresh funding from Atlas Venture and previous backer Brightspark Ventures to try and ‘reinvent travel search’.

Hopper is still in stealth mode, but if you’d like to learn more about what they’re cooking, check out this Boston.com profile or this article from Xconomy Boston.

Indeed, Hopper plans to open a new office in Boston, where it expects to double its engineering team over the next year.

The company is essentially building a ‘travel discovery’ engine for consumers, enabling people to discover destinations and products using only keywords such as “best beaches in Europe”.

The startup was conceived by Chief Engineer Sebastien Rainville, CEO Frederic Lalonde and Chief of Product Joost Ouwerkerk. The latter two came from Expedia, which acquired Lalonde’s previous company, Newtrade Technologies, back in 2002.

Hopper was originally founded in 2007 and previously raised $2 million in 2008, bringing the company’s total funding to $10 million today.

Jeff Fagnan, partner at Atlas Venture, will join the Hopper board of directors.


Company: Hopper
Website: hopper.com
Launch Date: February 23, 2012
Funding: $10M

Hopper is developing a website for consumer travel discovery. Its travel-oriented search engine allows users to discover destinations and products using only keywords. Hopper is applying cluster computing techniques to build the world’s largest database of travel information. The company is using Machine Learning, NoSQL databases and Big Data processing to transform raw web pages into structured and organized information, enabling a faster, more complete, and more flexible search than traditional travel sites.

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