HopSkip Raises $3M to Expand SaaS Platform for Events Booking

Sean Whalin

HopSkip, a Philadelphia startup running a SaaS platform to match event planners with hotels, has raised $3 million from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Conductive Ventures in a seed funding round.

The startup was co-founded in 2019 by CEO Sean Whalin, his brother Luke, who serves as an executive vice president, and chief technology officer Greg Leizerowicz. Sean previously worked at Comcast, while his brother was an executive at Toshiba. Leizerowicz came from Neudesic, a services firm that is now part of IBM.

“We decided to fund-raise to triple down on our beliefs and conviction of our platform solving a real problem and wanting to continue innovating and empowering our customers,” Sean Whalin told Technical.ly, after the bootstrapped startup closed its first funding round. HopSkip was a runner-up on Technical.ly’s RealLIST Startups list in 2020.

Soon after its founding, Hopskip was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, as in-person gatherings and hotel bookings came to a grinding halt. It has since bounced back. Today, it has more than 1,000 event planners and about 150,000 hotels, including Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton, on its platform.

HopSkip reportedly has crossed a million dollars in annual recurring revenue, as its business tripled in successive years. Whalin expects to enjoy similar growth for the “foreseeable future” on account of tailwinds.

According to the Business Journal, corporate event planners pay between $1,200 and $1,800 annually for membership, while hotels enjoy free membership, with the option to pay $4,000 a year for advanced features. Currently, event planners on HopSkip can issue requests for proposals to host corporate gatherings, and their event planning counterparts at hotels can then use the platform to submit a proposal to host the events, the Journal said.