Travel technology company Hopper appears to have laid off staff on its enterprise side, following the departure of the company’s co-founder last month.
The news: On Sept. 28, Hopper co-founder Dakota Smith announced on LinkedIn that he was leaving the company after leading its enterprise division, Hopper Technology Solutions, as CEO for the past three years. Shortly after, more than half a dozen employees posted on LinkedIn indicating their roles had been eliminated.
BetaKit reached out to Hopper for more details but has not yet received a response. In a LinkedIn message, Smith told BetaKit that he had nothing further to share on his departure and that he didn’t have insight into restructuring as his last day was in mid-September.
From the source: “Scaling an org from [less than] 200 employees to 1,200+ distributed across 37+ countries while keeping the bar as high as ours has been pure madness to say the least,” Kamil Eladas, a former technical recruitment manager who had worked at the company for nearly seven years, wrote in an Oct. 2 post. Eladas didn’t directly state whether his departure was due to the layoffs, but said that leaving the company was “bittersweet.”
The context: It’s unclear how the job cuts were distributed across the company, and whether Smith’s departure was related. HTS is Hopper’s B2B division that provides data, e-commerce, and financial technology services; it accounts for the majority of the company’s revenue.
Hopper has made multiple rounds of layoffs over the past few years as it has navigated changes to its partnerships. Earlier this year, Hopper client and US financial services giant Capital One brought the platform Hopper was developing, and the employees behind it, in-house. Hopper also inked significant deals this year, landing a partnership with Royal Bank of Canada to power its travel rewards program.
Final thought: The travel industry publication Skift reported that Hopper may be facing pressure from increased competition in Asia, due to travel company Booking Holdings’ upcoming consolidation of its brands Agoda, Priceline, and Booking.com.
Feature image courtesy Hopper.