Canadian startup Hopper, a popular travel booking app, announced Monday that it has received a $ 96 million investment from Capitol One to strengthen the long-term partnership between the two companies. Capital One previously led the F Hopper Series round, which raised $ 170 million in March 2021.
“The new funds will be used to accelerate the company’s growth in a variety of areas, including supporting new social commerce initiatives,” Hopper said in a statement to Forbes.
Hopper declined to quantify Capital One’s stake in the company, stating, “This investment and expansion of the partnership demonstrates the strong momentum the company sees one year into the partnership.”
Last year, Hopper and Capital One joined forces to launch Capital One Travel, a Hopper-based travel booking portal that combines cardholder benefits with fintech products such as price blocking, copy protection and l cancellation insurance for any reason.
“Since launch, Capital One Travel has taken travel bookings to record levels, surpassing pre-pandemic industry and volume growth, and repeated use of Capital One Travel continues to grow,” said Hopper.
Hopper, a privately held company with $ 4.5 billion in revenue this year, claims to be North America’s third largest online travel agency (OTA) with nearly 80 million downloads of its free apps.
Businesses are recovering during the Covid-19 pandemic, as uncertainty over travel disruption has fueled travelers’ desire to protect their investment with one or more fintech solutions to protect in-app prices. Nearly 60% of app users purchase at least one fintech product when ordering.
The company has been evasive about its current value. “We are a private company, so we don’t release estimates,” a Hopper spokesperson said. “However, this is a significant increase over our previous lead given all the recent growth outlined in the announcement.” Earlier this year, Forbes reported that Hopper was worth around $ 5 billion.
Despite rumors of a future IPO, Hopper declined to provide a time frame for the IPO. “There are currently no concrete plans for an IPO,” the company said. “We are currently focusing on developing Hopper applications alongside our fintech products and building the Hopper cloud business. Hopper redirects all profits to marketing expenses to accelerate growth. “
