Travel app Hopper raises $96 million from Capital One to double social commerce • TechCrunch

It is evident that the economic downturn has not affected investors in the tourism industry. Book your travels HuberToday announceThe company has now closed a $96 million capital one investment, bringing its total to $730 million. Frederic Lalonde, CEO and cofounder of Huber, stated in a press release that the new funds will be used to support Huber’s social commerce initiatives.

As part of the funding, Huber says he is expanding his partnership with Capital One (which… DroveHopper’s Series F) will be used to create new products for Capital One customers. Capital One Travel and Premier Collection are already powered by Hopper technology. This marketplace is only available to Capital One Venture X cardholders. It’s safe to say that similar experiences are on the horizon.

“With Hopper, we have found a partner who can not only match this pace, but help us continue to challenge the status quo and take a different approach to building a world-class travel brand,” Capital One Managing Vice President Matt Knise said in a statement. . “Through this strategic partnership, we are well positioned to adapt to the rapidly changing travel environment and create industry-leading solutions for our customers along their travel journey.”

Frederic Lalonde founded the company in 2007 with Joost Wehrirk. He spent six years hiding in what he called “the largest organized database of travel information in the world”. The company’s web crawling technology has captured blogs, photos-sharing sites, as well as other sources of information about location and geo-located it into a huge database of places. After Hopper’s public debut in 2014 however, the company’s leadership decided that mobile was their priority and would focus engineering resources on flight forecasting. This tool monitors airline fares and sends push notifications when price changes occur.

Hopper has grown to become one of North America’s most popular apps for travel. The app has been downloaded more than 80,000,000 times and sales of flights and hotels, as well as car rentals, have exceeded $4.5 billion. Hopper’s features, such as price freezes or flight disruption guarantees, make it stand out from other travel services like Travelocity. They are estimated to account for around 40% of the app’s total revenue.

Hopper Cloud was launched last year by Hopper. This partnership program allows travel providers like Kayak, Marriott, and Trip.com to resell Hopper’s fintech products or travel agencies through a white label portal. Hopper claims that cloud has seen rapid growth and is now more than 40% of Hopper’s business. Lalonde claims Hopper Cloud will achieve more in 2022 that Hopper did last years.

Hopper’s consumer focus shifted to in-app sales events, discounts, and promotions this spring. The company’s next major push is social commerce. It focuses on features such as referrals, profit sharing and daily giveaways. These offer users discounts on travel purchases in order to launch the app and to share with friends.

TechCrunch reported that Hopper was last valued in 2008 at $5 billion. mentionedIn February. The company, which controls 11.2% of US’s third-party airline travel market, plans on going public.