Navan – formerly TripActions – has made its fifth acquisition in two years, this time picking up Tripeur, a travel and expense management company based in India. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.
Founded in 2015, Tripeur provides a unified travel and expense solution for corporate travel.
“We’re excited to 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,” it was quoted in a company statement.
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.
In a statement announcing the acquisition, Navan co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen said the company has “spearheaded the transformation of the Indian travel market from offline to online, so this acquisition enables Navan to immediately solve for local obstacles, such as direct connections to local low-cost carriers and automated GST [goods and service tax] reconciliation of employee expenses.”
Today India has become the seventh-largest business travel market, with an anticipated annual growth rate of 9 per cent 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.
Navan senior vice president of product Jannik Waessa said that growth and shift to mobile makes India an ideal market for the company to enter to capture new business, and the acquisition will also enable it to better serve existing Navan clients.
“We see a lot of our customers, having a multinational presence, and with that India is one of the markets where we see a lot of our customer base having local operations,” he said.
“So there is a certain need from our existing customer base of building out a proper solution for India.”
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 their 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.
The Tripeur team will become part of Navan and, for now, the Tripeur brand will remain. 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.
