Navan Announces Fifth Acquisition with India-Based Tripeur

Company Is Poised to Transform Corporate Travel With the Addition of the Bengaluru-based Modern Corporate Travel and Expense Management Company.

We’re excited to today announce that Navan is acquiring Tripeur — a modern corporate travel and expense management company serving the $35 billion travel market in India. The agreement marks the fifth acquisition for the Navan Group in two years, following purchases in the UK, Germany, Sweden, and Spain.

Founded in 2015 and backed by some of India’s most prominent investors, Tripeur shares the same vision that we do at Navan: A seamless, unified travel and expense solution that delivers personalized experiences for business travelers, savings for CFOs, and increased efficiency for admins.

This alignment in innovation makes Tripeur a perfect complement to Navan’s ever-expanding global footprint. At Navan, our mission is to make the lives of travelers easy while saving companies money through a modern travel and expense super app that is designed for the people that are actually tasked with using it — and do so on a global scale.

But scaling globally isn’t as easy as it sounds when it comes to corporate travel and expense, and that’s especially true in historically manual markets with atypical inventory. Take India.

Here’s just how important India has become: It’s the world's seventh-largest business travel market, with an anticipated annual growth rate of 9%, and forecasted to grow to be the world’s third-largest economy by 2030. Key to this growth: mobile technology. India leads the world in per capita mobile data consumption and is projected to have 1 billion smartphone users by 2026.

In other words, multinational companies can’t afford to ignore this global business and technology epicenter. And our multinational customers have not, building ever-growing footprints there. But if you told me three years ago that our customers would demand we provide a completely online solution in India, I wouldn’t have believed it. And yet, here we are.

In order to truly provide a travel and expense management solution to global enterprise companies, traditionally, you have to be able to provide a few things:

• Local inventory. In India, this includes modes of transportation such as low-cost carriers, Indian Railways, booked taxis, interstate buses, and hired cars (with chauffeur).
• Local support. This not only includes traditional bookings help but VIP and lounge assistance at airports and visa facilitation (a much more complicated process in India than in other countries).

There are some markets that have heavily relied on manual processes, like India. But the world has changed, and recently, there’s been new requirements:

• Localized, online tech that is people-centric and brings the same user experience their employees love via Navan to these previously manual markets
• Direct connections with airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indigo (something legacy players like Egencia and Concur are currently struggling to adapt their technology to support)

Tripeur has spearheaded the transformation of the Indian travel market from offline to online, so this acquisition enables Navan to immediately solve local obstacles, such as direct connections to local low-cost carriers and automated GST reconciliation of employee expenses. The Navan team will be able to ingest and scale this technology in order to serve our growing list of enterprise customers, such as Unilever, Adobe, and Thomson Reuters that demand the Navan experience for their employees, regardless of their geographic location.

Taking on the challenges of T&E in India requires a truly unified, modern solution that can handle both travel and expense. Integrating Tripeur’s local inventory, technology, and support with Navan’s platform combines the best of two worlds to provide an unparalleled offering for the Indian market. The result? A globally consistent, modern online user experience — powered by the latest AI technology — that still caters to local needs.

With the acquisition of Tripeur, Navan charges into India at full speed, instantly becoming a game-changer in this critical market that’s poised to transform the global economy. We are excited to continue this journey and to expand into further markets.