Startup Hopper announced its close of $12 million Series B round of funding from Canada’s OMERS Ventures who recently took a large stake in Hootsuite. The new round brings Hopper’s total funding to $22 million with the participation of previous investments from Atlas Venture and Brightspark Ventures. Derek Smyth of OMERS will join Hopper’s board.
The company’s executive team is staffed up with former Expedia engineers, including Frederic Lalonde Founder and CEO, Joost Ouwerkerk VP Product, André Coudé VP Technology, and Mathieu Patenaude CIO. Also Dena Yahya Enos former CMO of TripAdvisor.
Hopper won’t be a travel search engine, their mission is to use big data tools to bring structure to the web’s travel-related information, the startup’s focus is to take the frustration out of trip planning and make travel search smarter.
Hopper has already attained more than half a billion pages of travel data. By the end of the year, they plan to double it and catalog all the best travel data on the internet in the world.
I am hoping I am one of the first 500 who has signed to receive an early peek at this travel site. Expected launch late 2012.