Hyped Travel Startup Hopper Does Everything, Except Actually Launch
Skift Take
Technology aside, will travelers care about Hopper if they ever see a product after six years of development? If you have patience in excess, then stay tuned.
Founded six years ago, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Hopper proclaims it has "reinvented the trip-planning experience," but you'd have to take the company at its word about that because it still hasn't revealed a product publicly, even in beta.
The company has raised $22 million in funding in two institutional rounds already, prior to its launch, and a year ago, when it received a $12 million Series B funding, it was supposedly close to launching then, but the timetable has apparently been stretched out -- again and again, and again.
Six years is a long time. It surely breaks the record for the longest gestated consumer Internet startup of all time.
In 2007, the year that Hopper founder and CEO Fred Lalonde and co-founder and CTO Joost Ouwerkerk created the company in Montreal and started exchanging ideas in a loft, the Great Recession in the U.S. was just about to begin.
SideStep was acquired in 2007 by Kayak. Anyone remember SideStep?
JetBlue stranded passengers for hours on a snowy JFK runway that year, leading to a CEO apology video, and eventually to tarmac-delay legislation.
And, both the Airbus 380 and Virgin America separately announced their first commercial flights in 2007.
It's been so long since Hopper was founded that you hesitate to even call Hopper a startup anymore.
What Do We Know about Hopper?
Founder Lalonde, who as CTO sold distri
