The travel FinTech Hopper announced on Tuesday (Aug. 17) that it had completed a $175 million Series G funding round.
The company says it will use the funds to fuel its growth on several fronts, including customer support. That comes after a year of what it calls “unprecedented customer support requests,” which led Hopper to scale its customer support staff by 200 percent and to develop automation tools that have allowed 60 percent of its customer support requests to be handled instantly.
Hopper says it is also hiring 500 new employees, 300 of them focused on customer service, while also trying to “acqui-hire” workers from travel, data science and engineering-heavy startups to launch new products and expand internationally.
Earlier this year, Hopper announced the launch of “Hopper Cloud,” a B2B initiative that lets any travel provider – travel agencies, airlines, meta-search companies, etc. – integrate and distribute Hopper’s content.
In March, the company announced that it had taken in $170 million in venture funding fueled by Capital One, which worked with Hopper to create Capital One Travel for the bank’s cardholders. The partnership was designed to protect against price volatility and ensure that travelers get the best value when booking trips, while also making it easier to change or cancel reservations.
Learn more: Hopper Lands $170M, Launches Travel Partnership With Capital One
“The success of our FinTech offerings demonstrates that travelers are willing to pay for flexibility and assurance as they resume traveling again,” said Frederic Lalonde, CEO and co-founder of Hopper, in a news release. “We feel strongly that our FinTech offerings through Hopper Cloud can help supercharge the travel industry’s recovery by introducing a totally unique revenue stream for other brands. In fact, if all travel distribution channels offered our FinTech, it could increase the total consumer spend for the sector by $200 billion annually.”
The latest funding round was led by GPI Capital, with participation from Glade Brook Capital, WestCap, Goldman Sachs Growth and Accomplice.
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