Agora Achieves 43% Flight Savings and 90% Time Savings with Navan

Region

NORAM: North America

Headquarters

Santa Clara, California

Industry

Tech

Products Used

• Navan Business Travel
• Navan Travel Payments

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A leader in Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service, Agora provides developers with simple-to-use APIs to embed high-definition voice and video, as well as conversational AI, into any application or website. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with major hubs in Shanghai and India, Agora has employees located around the world. As a company built on seamless communication, Agora’s internal operations require the same level of agility and connectivity it provides to its own customers.

Before Navan

Prior to partnering with Navan, Agora’s travel management was a decentralized and manual process. Employees booked through a disparate mix of third-party consumer sites, direct airline portals, and search engines like Google Flights — a loose solution that created significant blind spots for the organization. In fact, the lack of a centralized system left the company with zero visibility into employee locations, safety controls, or policy compliance, according to Bradford Simpson, senior manager of people and programs at Agora. 

The burden was even heavier for the finance team, which had to manually calculate the company’s total travel spend by hunting through individual expense reports.

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Navan’s implementation and onboarding process was very easy, very simple, and very smooth.

Brad Simpson

Senior Manager of People and Programs

Why Navan

The impetus for change stemmed from Agora’s need for two outputs in particular: budget control and administrative guidance. The company required a platform that could provide a clear, real-time view of expenditures while simplifying the booking process for a sales-heavy organization that frequently travels for global events. 

Agora chose Navan for its robust functionality and an implementation process that Simpson described as “very easy, very simple, and very smooth.”

Results with Navan

The transition to Navan has delivered immediate and measurable value across the organization, particularly as Agora’s internal culture increasingly embraces automation and AI. ”We’re using a lot of AI for different things, and it’s been pulled into different workflows to make us more efficient,” said Simpson. “Having Navan as our travel program has contributed to those time savings with automatic policy controls and the AI support chat. It’s dramatically reduced the time I spend answering employees’ day-to-day questions, freeing me up to do other things.” 

This tech-forward approach has translated into a 43% reduction in flight costs, a result of Navan’s ability to surface competitive global inventory while simultaneously enforcing budget-conscious policies at the point of purchase. Beyond the bottom line, the partnership has fostered a culture of traveler autonomy; employees can find the flights and hotels they need, and no longer face the friction of waiting for manual approvals. This seamless experience is reflected in a remarkable 4.9/5 CSAT score, proving that when powerful inventory meets intelligent automation, the company’s budget and its people can both thrive.

Simpson highlights that this shift has been transformative, especially when coordinating large-scale events. “When we would have multiple team members joining an event, I would literally spend 20 to 40 hours per event trying to coordinate and find flights. With Navan, it literally dropped down to maybe 30 minutes. Company-wide, we’ve reduced the time needed to book and manage travel for those all-hands events by 90%.”

“

Having Navan as our travel program has contributed to those time savings with automatic policy controls and the AI support chat. It’s dramatically reduced the time I spend answering employees’ day-to-day questions, freeing me up to do other things.

Brad Simpson

Senior Manager of People and Programs

Future with Navan

By consolidating its travel program into a single, intuitive platform, Agora has traded administrative headaches for strategic oversight. The combination of significant cost savings, enhanced traveler safety, and a massive reduction in manual coordination has allowed the team to focus on their core mission of powering global engagement. As Agora continues to grow its international presence, Navan remains a critical partner in helping to ensure their global team stays connected, safe, and within budget.