MONTREAL, CANADA, Hopper, a stealth startup founded by a team of former Expedia employees, announced today that it has raised $8M in new funding from Atlas Venture and Brightspark Ventures.

Jeff Fagnan, partner at Atlas Venture, will join the Hopper board of directors. "The online travel planning experience is due for an upgrade," he explained, "and Hopper has the technology and the team to bring about a fundamental shift in the way we search for travel."

"We're really excited to be working with Jeff and Atlas," added Hopper CEO Frederic Lalonde. Hopper will open a new office in Boston, where it expects to double its engineering team over the next year. According to Lalonde, Hopper is "eager to build on the local travel technology expertise that's centered around MIT and to contribute to Boston's Big Data community."

Hopper (www.hopper.travel) is developing a website for consumer travel discovery. Its travel-oriented search engine allows users to discover destinations and products using only keywords. A search like "best beaches in europe," for instance, instantly displays a complete list of European destinations ranked by beach quality, with the best available flights, hotels and packages for each.

Hopper is applying cluster computing techniques to build the world's largest database of travel information. The company is using Machine Learning, NoSQL databases and Big Data processing to transform raw web pages into structured and organized information, enabling a faster, more complete, and more flexible search than traditional travel sites.

Hopper was founded in 2007 and previously raised $2M in 2008, bringing the company's total funding to $10M.