Hipmunk

The flight search that sorted by agony, bought by a corporate expense company and switched off while its founders were trying to buy it back

Acquired & killed
19902026

Hipmunk was a San Francisco travel search site founded in 2010 by Adam Goldstein and Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman. It showed flights as coloured bars on a timeline instead of a list, sorted by an agony score combining price, duration and stops, with a chipmunk mascot. Concur bought it in 2016, SAP bought Concur, and the site was shut down on 23 January 2020, nine days after the announcement, despite a buyback offer from the founders.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2010
  2. 19 August 2010 Launch
    Hipmunk launches

    Flights as bars on a timeline, sorted by agony.

  3. 2011
  4. 2011 Feature
    Hotel search with heatmaps
  5. 2014
  6. 30 May 2014 Funding
    $20 million round

    About $55 million raised in total.

  7. 2016
  8. September 2016 Acquisition
    Concur buys Hipmunk
  9. 2020
  10. 14 January 2020 Shutdown announced
    Nine days of notice

    The founders offer to buy it back; SAP declines.

  11. 23 January 2020 Shutdown
    Hipmunk closes

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: hipmunk.com, 13 June 2012 →

Browse hipmunk.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Hipmunk, Inc. 2010–2016 Founded Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman, San Francisco
Concur (SAP) 2016–2020 Acquisition Bought for the technology and team; closed the consumer site

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: SAP Concur, which had bought Hipmunk in 2016, announced in January 2020 that the consumer site and apps would close on 23 January 2020. The founders offered to buy the company back and were refused.

Our analysis: Hipmunk fixed the one thing everyone hated about flight search, the unreadable list, and replaced it with a timeline where every flight was a bar you could see, sorted by an agony score of price, duration and stops. That earned it press, loyalty and $55 million of funding, but metasearch is a brutal business: Google bought ITA and put flight results straight into search, Kayak had scale, and referral margins kept thinning. Selling to Concur in 2016 looked like safety and turned out to be the end; a corporate expense giant had no strategic need for a beloved consumer brand, and when the integration work was done it closed the site rather than run it. The refused buyback made the shutdown feel less like economics and more like tidying.

History [edit]

Sorted by agony

Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman launched Hipmunk on 19 August 2010 with a demo that sold itself: search a route and instead of a thousand-row list you got a timeline, each flight a horizontal bar showing when it left, when it landed, where it stopped, coloured by airline. The default sort was called agony, a blend of price, duration and number of stops, a word the founders picked out of a thesaurus days before launch. A chipmunk in aviator goggles was the logo. Hotel search followed, with heatmaps that shaded neighbourhoods by nightlife or food.

Hipmunk raised more than $55 million, including a $20 million round in 2014, built well-reviewed mobile apps, and stayed the critics\' favourite flight search for most of a decade. What it never became was the biggest: Kayak had reach, and after Google bought ITA Software in 2011 flight results appeared at the top of a Google search, above everyone.

Bought for the technology, closed for tidiness

Concur, the corporate travel and expense company owned by SAP, bought Hipmunk in autumn 2016. The consumer site kept running while the team worked on Concur products. On 14 January 2020 SAP Concur announced Hipmunk would close on 23 January, nine days later. Goldstein and Huffman publicly offered to buy the company back and keep the site alive; SAP refused. The founders returned in 2021 with Flight Penguin, a browser extension recreating the timeline search, and Huffman went back to running Reddit.

The domain today

hipmunk.com redirects to SAP Concur. The chipmunk is retired.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Four years after being acquired, Hipmunk is shutting down TechCrunch 14 January 2020 [archived]
  2. Startup Hipmunk offers dazzling new view of flight search CNN Money 19 August 2010 [archived]
  3. Miss Hipmunk? Meet Flight Penguin Fast Company 1 April 2021 [archived]
  4. hipmunk.com in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 June 2012

Last verified: 31 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).