Hyped Travel Startup Hopper Does Everything, Except Actually Launch
Photo Credit: Hipmunk's chipmunk is a lot more appealing than Hopper's bunny, but icons aside, both companies are trying to take the pain out of trip-planning. Hopper
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
