BuuPass is pushing into Kenya’s corporate travel market with the launch of a new platform, Gavanpass, as it looks to digitise a largely manual segment of Africa’s enterprise economy.
The Nairobi-based company said that more than 20 organisations across Kenya, including banks, fintechs, insurers, and manufacturers are already using the product to manage business travel.
The launch marks a strategic shift for BuuPass, which has spent the past eight years building a consumer marketplace for bus, rail, and flight bookings. Since its founding in 2017, the company says it has sold over 30 million tickets and processed more than $100 million in travel transactions in the past year alone, with operations spanning Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa.
With Gavanpass, the startup is targeting finance and procurement teams responsible for overseeing travel budgets, as well as operations staff coordinating trips. The platform brings together bookings for flights, hotels, buses, ground transport, and group travel into a single system, alongside built-in approval workflows, policy controls, and real-time expense tracking.
“Finance leaders have been telling us their problem is bigger than consumer travel,” co-founder and co-CEO Sonia Kabra said. “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 across many African markets, the process remains fragmented and largely offline. Bookings are often handled via phone calls or messaging apps, approvals are spread across email threads, and reconciliation can take weeks especially for companies operating across multiple currencies.
BuuPass argues that existing global tools have struggled to adapt to these realities. According to co-founder and co-CEO Wycliffe Omondi, many platforms are built for other markets and only later adapted for Africa’s more complex operating environment, which includes currency volatility, fragmented suppliers, and cross-border travel challenges.
The move comes as startups across the continent increasingly turn to enterprise software in search of more predictable revenue streams, amid tighter funding conditions and growing pressure to demonstrate profitability.
Investors appear to be taking note. FrontEnd Ventures, an early backer of BuuPass, said the new product reflects the company’s track record of building in response to user needs. General partner Njeri Muhia described Gavanpass as an extension of that approach into the enterprise segment.
BuuPass plans to expand the platform across sub-Saharan Africa in the coming months, betting that companies operating across multiple markets will increasingly adopt unified systems to manage travel spend, compliance, and reporting.