In 2007, Frederic Lalonde did something most people would call insane. He walked away from a senior role at Expedia, the company that had just bought his last startup, to build a travel business that wouldn't sell a single flight for another eight years.
Lalonde and fellow Expedia engineer Joost Ouwerkerk had a contrarian belief: the real value in travel wasn't the booking, it was the data. If you knew enough about how prices moved, you could tell someone the one thing no travel site would ever say out loud, which was "don't buy yet."
So they started small and slow, as a humble content aggregator quietly crawling billions of web pages and stacking up trillions of historical prices. For years it looked like nothing. Then in 2014, a throwaway data story about Colorado airfares jumping 20% after marijuana legalisation went nuclear across national media, and Lalonde finally understood what they'd built. Not a blog. A machine that could predict the price of a plane ticket. This was the beginning of Hopper.
2007: Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk, both ex-Expedia, founded Hopper in Montreal as a travel content aggregator. It would take seven years and a database crawling more than two billion web pages before they had a product anyone would use.
2012: Dakota Smith joined as a third co-founder and Hopper closed a $12M Series B from OMERS and Atlas Venture, still years before launch.
January 2015: Hopper launched a mobile-only app that predicted flight prices and told users when to buy. On release night, Apple called from Cupertino and asked them to go worldwide. It hit a million downloads and won Apple's App Store Best of 2015.
December 2016: A Series C of roughly $61M funded the prediction algorithm and a push into hotels, added the following year. Downloads passed 10 million.
October 2018: Hopper raised a $100M Series D at a $780M valuation, with 40 million-plus downloads and a new bet brewing: travel fintech.
April 2020: COVID nearly ended it. March was Hopper's biggest month ever, then almost every flight got cancelled and the refunds threatened to wipe the company out. Lalonde called it "the zombie apocalypse," laid off or furloughed around 250 people, just under half the staff, and only survived on a Canadian government-backed $70M rescue round.
March 2021: Capital One led a $170M round and Hopper became a unicorn. Fintech add-ons like price freeze and cancel-for-any-reason were now the growth engine, at one point about 40% of app revenue.
November 2022: A further $96M from Capital One valued Hopper above $5B, taking total funding to $740M. With around 1,500 staff and nearly 80 million downloads, it was the third-largest online travel agency in North America. Its B2B arm, Hopper Cloud, was already outgrowing the consumer app.
2023 to 2024: Expedia pulled its hotel inventory, roughly half of Hopper's global supply, triggering layoffs of about 30% of staff, then another 10%. Hopper stopped pretending it was a consumer company and went all in on B2B.
Today: In April 2026, Capital One brought Capital One Travel fully in-house, acquiring the underlying tech and around 150 Hopper employees, and stripping Hopper of its single biggest partner.
Hopper spent nearly a decade becoming the travel app more than 120 million people downloaded, a top-of-the-App-Store name everyone recognised. But the money was never really in the app. By 2025, roughly 90% of the business came from the unglamorous B2B arm selling its fintech plumbing to banks and airlines. Then its biggest partner simply bought the piece it wanted and walked. The app got the fame. The plumbing got the revenue. When your side project quietly eats your headline product, follow the money, not the applause.