Kenyan mobility startup BuuPass is expanding into corporate travel with the launch of Gavanpass, a platform designed to help African businesses manage travel bookings, spending, and compliance from a single system.
The move comes as the company seeks to address inefficiencies in how enterprises handle travel across the continent, where fragmented systems and manual processes continue to dominate operations.
“Finance leaders have been telling us their problem is bigger than consumer travel,” BuuPass co-founder and co-CEO Sonia Kabra told TechCabal.
Founded in 2017, BuuPass has built a consumer-facing marketplace for bus, rail, and flight bookings across Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa. The company says it has sold more than 30 million tickets and processed over $100 million in travel transactions in the past year alone.
Africa’s corporate travel market is growing—but still manual
Corporate travel is a significant but under-digitised segment globally, accounting for an estimated 3–5% of enterprise revenue. In Africa, however, the sector remains largely manual, creating inefficiencies for businesses operating across multiple markets.
Bookings are often handled through phone calls or messaging apps, approvals are scattered across email chains, and reconciliation can take weeks—especially for companies dealing with multiple currencies and suppliers.
- Yet the opportunity is expanding rapidly. Africa recorded over $75 billion in inbound travel spending in 2025, with business travel contributing about $10.6 billion, or roughly 14 percent, according to Euromonitor International.
- Inbound business travel also grew at an average annual rate of 28 percent between 2021 and 2025, highlighting strong post-pandemic recovery and demand.
- Domestic corporate travel adds another layer of scale. In markets like South Africa and Kenya, it contributes an estimated $689 million annually, showing the size of the opportunity.
Despite this growth, most global corporate travel tools are not built for African realities, where currency volatility, fragmented suppliers, and cross-border logistics complicate operations.
BuuPass bets on a unified platform for enterprise travel
With Gavanpass, BuuPass is positioning itself to digitise this fragmented ecosystem by offering a single platform that integrates flights, hotels, buses, and ground transport, alongside approval workflows and real-time expense tracking.
In building this solution, the company is leveraging its years of experience in consumer travel, where it developed infrastructure for ticketing and payments across multiple countries.
Its expansion into corporate travel is already yielding results, with more than 20 enterprises across Kenya—including banks, fintechs, insurers, and manufacturers—now using Gavanpass.
- Sonia Kabra noted that finance leaders say “they need one platform that handles everything, but also gives them the controls they actually need.”
That insight has shaped Gavanpass into a product targeting finance and procurement teams, as well as operations staff who manage employee travel. The platform embeds policy controls and compliance features tailored to African enterprises.
BuuPass plans to roll out Gavanpass across sub-Saharan Africa in the coming months, targeting regional companies with multi-country operations that require a unified system to manage travel spend and compliance.
