BUSINESS TRAVEL
Hopper | August 18, 2021
Hopper is announcing that it has completed a $175 million Series G financing led by GPI Capital with participation from Glade Brook Capital, WestCap, Goldman Sachs Growth and Accomplice as the company emerges from the pandemic stronger than ever.
As the travel industry continues to rebound, Hopper has demonstrated significant outperformance with its category-leading mobile-only marketplace, delivering value to customers and supply partners with the company's proprietary suite of fintech offerings. Hopper has over 60 million downloads, consistently ranks as one of the most downloaded travel apps, and now has a larger air travel market share in North America than it did before the pandemic (source: MIDT) along with a growing suite of API-enabled solutions for its B2B initiative. Based on its current run rate, Hopper is pacing towards 330% revenue growth compared to last year and it has already surpassed its pre-pandemic revenue peak from Q1 2020 by over 100%. Product roll-outs have been delivered over an increasingly diversified mix of air, hotel and car rental bookings with the company's fintech offerings now representing a majority of its revenue.
Whether it's pricing volatility or avoiding trip disruptions, Hopper's fintech offerings aim to address every pain point in the customer journey while driving conversion, repeat purchases, and profitability. Earlier in the year, Hopper announced that it was launching a B2B initiative called Hopper Cloud. Through this partnership program, any travel provider – airlines, online travel agencies, meta-search companies, travel agencies, etc. – can integrate and seamlessly distribute Hopper's fintech or agency content. Additionally, Hopper Cloud offers white-label travel portals for companies that aspire to sell travel with a differentiated consumer experience and offering. By leveraging its vast data assets, Hopper takes on all financial risk as its AI is able to dynamically price each fintech offering on a real-time basis at scale.
"The success of our fintech offerings demonstrate that travelers are willing to pay for flexibility and assurance as they resume traveling again," said Frederic Lalonde, CEO and Co-Founder of Hopper. "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. We are excited to be partnering with GPI and their distinguished track record of supporting iconic consumer internet companies. We welcome Khai to the board as we execute on a roadmap for sustained growth over the long term."
Khai Ha, Managing Partner at GPI Capital, commented "Hopper has created a large market opportunity with unique fintech products for the travel industry that applies an entirely differentiated and attractive business model in which we are excited to work with Fred and the leadership team to accelerate the flywheel. The company emerged from a challenging period for the industry, bolstering its technology capabilities, customer service and its opportunity set with a stronger, durable foundation. We are thrilled to be a partner in this category-defining story."
The funds will be used to accelerate the company's growth across several fronts including customer support. Following a year of unprecedented customer support requests, Hopper has scaled its customer support team by 200% and developed several self-serve automation tools so that 60% of customer support requests are now resolved instantly. Hopper is hiring an additional 500 employees, of which 300 of them are focused on customer service. The company is actively looking to acqui-hire other teams in travel, data science, or engineering-heavy startups to introduce new product offerings and fuel international expansion. Hopper has had recent success integrating the teams of Journy and Mowgli, which will accelerate entry into new travel categories such as home rentals and regional expansion to Europe.
Kirkland & Ellis LLP and McCarthy Tétrault LLP acted as legal counsel to GPI Capital.
About Hopper
Hopper is the world's fastest-growing mobile-first travel marketplace. By leveraging massive amounts of data and machine learning, the company has developed several unique fintech solutions that help customers save money and travel better. Through its B2B initiative, Hopper Cloud, the company is syndicating its fintech solutions, infrastructure, and agency content. Whether it's pricing volatility or trip disruptions, Hopper's proprietary suite of fintech solutions address every pain point in the customer journey while driving conversion, repeat purchases, and profitability.
About GPI Capital
GPI Capital is an alternative investment firm specializing in leading growth equity investments in technology, consumer and industrial companies. GPI focuses on identifying high quality businesses looking to accelerate growth and execute on transformational opportunities with an engaged and value-add partner
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TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY
Iteris | December 08, 2020
Iteris, a global leader in smart mobility infrastructure management, has agreed to acquire TrafficCast International that gives travel information technology, for $16 million.
Madison, Wisconsin-based TrafficCast recorded following 12-month of $14.6 million and changed EBITDA of $1.2 million for the period ending September 30, 2020. Around 60% of the organization's complete sales is identified with its software product items and is accounted for as annual recurring revenue.
TrafficCast works two lines of business – commercial and public area – every of which contributes around 50% of total revenue.
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BUSINESS TRAVEL
Grasp Technologies, Traxo | October 05, 2021
Grasp Technologies, the leader in data management, consolidation, payment integration, and data visualization for the corporate travel industry, announced its new partnership with Traxo, the global leader in corporate travel data capture and pre-trip auditing. The partnership provides corporate travel managers worldwide with the ability to see the most complete data picture of their companies’ business travel, including all on and off-platform bookings, within Grasp’s robust data and intelligence suite. An industry leader for more than 25 years, Grasp serves more than 150,000 corporate travel departments in over 70 countries through its footprint.
“The corporate travel industry needs a truly complete, accurate, and timely data solution for tracking and consolidating all aspects of a travel program – a true end-to-end platform that delivers actionable, real results, At Grasp, we have worked tirelessly on this problem for over 20 years and have created the technology, data consolidation, and data management processes to ensure the most accurate and timely data for our clients, but we were missing one piece – one of the most, if not the most important one – un-managed booking data or travel leakage. Traxo has solved that problem.”
said Grasp Technologies Chief Sales Officer Dave Lukas
Managing travel data has been a challenge for corporate travel departments in that it is disparate, disjointed, and fragmented across many different systems and platforms, and lacks timeliness. This complexity prevents companies from effectively providing duty of care for traveling employees, or proactively managing business travel expenses, which are traditionally the second largest controllable expense in a corporation. Compounding the issue further is that employees often book their travel outside the company’s mandated travel policy, travel agency, and/or booking tool, essentially making these travel plans invisible to the corporation.
In fact, according to travel bookings made by Grasp clients in 2017 through 2019, an average of 40 percent of all business travel bookings were made outside the corporate travel policy. The total amount of “leakage” or invisible bookings by segment were, Railway: 64 percent, Hotels: 57 percent, Car Rental: 34 percent, Airlines: 5 percent.
As a result of this new partnership with Traxo, for the first time in two decades, Grasp can now offer its users a simple way to finally view and incorporate these previously invisible bookings into their data platform.
“With our unique ability to capture all travel bookings, regardless of whether they were booked directly with a travel supplier or within the company-mandated travel program or not, Grasp’s clients now can not only track their off-channel bookings, but be able to take action on these bookings, pre-trip, “This gives them the opportunity to ensure they’re receiving their corporate negotiated discounts, re-shop the flight, hotel, rental car, or rail booking to obtain the best available prices, or provide coverage for duty-of-care purposes.”
said Traxo Founder and Chief Executive Officer Andres Fabris.
“By combining the power of our two solutions, we have solved one of the greatest data challenges in our industry and have created a solution that allows clients to go further in managing their travel program like never before,” Lukas noted.
As part of the agreement, Grasp is using the Traxo technology internally to help better manage its own business travel, and Grasp is now a Traxo Marketplace partner, so it can automatically receive structured travel data from Traxo’s corporate clients.
The companies will be expounding on their new partnership during a free webinar scheduled for tomorrow, October 5, 2021, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time. Interested parties may register at the link below: https://go.grasptech.com/webinar-grasp-technologies-and-traxo
About Grasp Technologies
Founded in 1996, Grasp Technologies works extensively in the worldwide travel industry, providing data management, consolidation, payment integration and data visualization for the travel industry and other industries. Grasp differentiates itself by helping clients navigate changing business environments by providing the custom combinations of reporting and predictive analysis. Grasp Technologies has offices in San Diego, California, and Columbus, Ohio.
About Traxo
Dallas-based Traxo, Inc., the global leader in corporate travel data capture and pre-trip auditing, eliminates blind spots and enhances duty of care by enabling corporate travel managers and managed travel agencies to easily track and proactively manage complete omnichannel travel activity in a single, real-time, system of record. Founded in 2008, Traxo clients and partners include Amex GBT, United Airlines, Lufthansa, Easy Jet, Tripadvisor, Chrome River / Emburse, Coupa, International SOS, WorldAware, and many more. Two recent Business Travel News Travel Managers of the Year use Traxo, and The Business Travel Magazine recently named the Company to its 2021 Tech HotList, a list of the “top tech innovators shaking up the industry.” With Traxo, corporations reduce risk, improve traveler safety and maximize savings
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