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OMERS Ventures is setting its sights on the travel planning industry.
The venture capital investment arm of one of Canada’s largest pension plans is the leading investor in a $12-million funding round for Hopper, a start-up travel planning company based in Massachusetts. Other participants in the round include Brightspark Ventures and Atlas Venture.
Derek Smyth, managing director of OMERS Ventures, will join the Hopper board as a director.
“It’s really important to OMERS Ventures that we are leading a significant round of financing for a company like Hopper that has the strong potential to be a game changer in its industry,” he said. “Hopper is exactly the kind of company we look to partner with over the long term.”
OMERS Ventures invests in companies with significant potential and market opportunity, focusing on high-growth companies in the technology, media and telecommunications sectors. Other OMERS Ventures investments include Hootsuite, BuildDirect and Wave Accounting Inc.
To date, Hopper has crawled more than half a billion pages of travel data, with plans to double that by the end of the year—which would make it the biggest travel database in the world.