Online shopping sites all tend to look the same, with small thumbnail images on a white background. But Neha Singh had a bright idea: Why not change that—and take shopping into the metaverse? The result, Obsess, is a platform that marries shopping with gaming and virtual reality, allowing shoppers to browse in the virtual stores of global brands.
With the world on the threshold of mainstream VR, Obsess saw a 400% increase from brands and retailers in 2021, and that growth has not slowed down. So what’s a scaling company with a very bright future to do with challenges in travel and expense?
When Obsess went about searching for a solution, it had one objective in mind: Obsess needed something future-proof, a solution that could scale, and the company got exactly what it needed when it adopted Navan.
Challenges
Results with Navan
"We started to do our homework,” said Virgilio Torres, Director of Finance and Accounting. “My number-one goal was to understand how Navan could help us from an expense management side, because the travel side was self-evident. Once we saw all that Navan could do, we knew we didn't want a separate expense product. I mean, why would we when Navan consolidates T&E in one package?"
“It comes down to having full visibility of everything that's happening in one frame,” said Torres. “With Navan, we have instant access to spend dashboards that show us who is spending what and why.”
The real-time spend visibility is the result of Navan's unified travel, corporate card, and expense management solution.
Using Navan for the majority of expenses, combined with high employee booking adoption—100% of employees required to travel have adopted Navan for travel—has given Obsess both instant spend visibility and more than $7,000 back, thanks to the corporate card rebate.
But the savings didn’t end there. In just six months since adopting Navan, in March 2022, Obsess has saved 18% on all bookings, with 40% saved on hotels.
The reports are great, but about two months in, I realized we had truly made the right investment. From a cash management perspective, Navan has given us the bandwidth to have 30 days of additional cash in the bank, because all of our expenses are paid using Navan and we have until the beginning of the next month to pay that off. As a startup, this is a huge opportunity for extended runway.
Virgilio Torres
Director of Finance and Accounting