BuuPass, a Kenyan mobility startup, is expanding beyond its consumer roots with the launch of a corporate travel platform, Gavanpass, as it looks to capture a largely undigitised segment of Africa’s enterprise economy.
The Nairobi-based company told TechCabal on Thursday that more than 20 enterprises across Kenya—including banks, fintechs, insurers, and manufacturers—are already using the platform to manage business travel.
The move marks a strategic pivot for BuuPass, which has spent the past eight years building a consumer-facing marketplace for bus, rail, and flight bookings.
Since its founding in 2017, the company says it has sold more than 30 million tickets and processed over $100 million in travel transactions in the past year alone, primarily across Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa.
With Gavanpass, BuuPass targets finance and procurement teams that oversee corporate travel budgets, as well as operations staff who coordinate trips. The platform integrates bookings for flights, hotels, buses, ground transfers, and group travel into a single system, while embedding approval workflows, policy controls, and real-time spend tracking.
“Finance leaders have been telling us their problem is bigger than consumer travel,” BuuPass co-founder and co-CEO Sonia Kabra told TechCabal. “They need one platform that handles everything, but also gives them the controls they actually need.”
Corporate travel accounts for an estimated 3–5% of enterprise revenue globally, but in many African markets, the category remains heavily manual. Bookings are mostly handled via phone calls or messaging apps, while approvals are dispersed across email chains, and reconciliation can stretch weeks, particularly for companies operating in multiple currencies.
The company argues that existing global corporate travel tools are poorly adapted to African operating environments, where currency volatility, supplier fragmentation, and cross-border travel present unique challenges.
“Most enterprise software is built elsewhere and then localised,” said Wycliffe Omondi, BuuPass co-founder and co-CEO. “We built this from the ground up with African finance and procurement teams.”
The launch comes as African startups look to enterprise software as a path to more predictable revenues, amid tougher funding conditions and rising pressure to demonstrate profitability.
FrontEnd Ventures, an early investor in BuuPass, said the new product reflects the founders’ track record of building products that respond to user needs.
“Gavanpass applies the same instinct to the enterprise market,” said Njeri Muhia, a general partner at the firm.
BuuPass plans to roll out Gavanpass across sub-Saharan Africa in the coming months, betting that regional companies—especially those with operations in multiple countries—will adopt a unified system to manage travel spend and compliance.
