Two Expedia executives walked away from one of the world's biggest travel companies in April 2007 to build something that did not yet make money. It was not even about flights.
Frederic Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk had spent years inside the machine of online travel. They knew how trips were sold, and they knew how clumsy planning still felt. So they started Hopper in Montreal as a tool for working out where to go and what to do when you got there. A planning site is a hard thing to turn into a business. People browse it, enjoy it, and book somewhere else.
Hopper's app watched fares, sent alerts, and told people when to move.
That is the part of the story that rarely gets told. The company everyone now knows for airfares spent its early years as something else, and the founders had to let go of their first idea to find a better one. Its effect is clear. The product that launched in January 2014 and the app that arrived in 2015 were built around one question: should I buy this ticket now, or wait?
Answering it meant predicting prices. Hopper's app watched fares, sent alerts, and told people when to move. Investors followed. A US$12m Series B in 2012 from OMERS and Atlas Venture kept the lights on, and by 2016 and 2018 the rounds were US$62m and US$100m. Hotels came in 2017. Then fintech features, which let customers lock a price for a fee, turned worry into revenue.
What almost nobody outside the industry noticed was how much the company leaned on the very anxiety it soothed. Capital One put in US$170m in March 2021 and Hopper became a unicorn. By February 2022 it was valued at US$5bn.
The price came later. In 2018 a Secret Fares programme angered Air Canada and WestJet, who said the fares were falsely sold as exclusive. Hopper shut it down. In July 2026 it agreed to pay US$35m to settle FTC claims that it charged fees without consent and misled users about them. The business that sold certainty was being asked to explain its fine print.
Today Hopper reports revenue of about US$850m (2024) and runs a B2B arm selling its travel technology to banks and airlines.
For a first-time founder, the lesson is in the pivot hiding at the start. Lalonde and Ouwerkerk had the credentials to defend their first idea. They chose the one customers actually paid for.