Navisteps Lands $1 Million For SMB Travel, Cost Management

Travel and cost management company Navisteps has notched $1 million in a pre-seed round, with investment originating from angel investors, Phocuswire reported.

“While expense and travel management solutions are not new, they traditionally target large enterprises. We hope to bring the benefits of expense and travel management solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through a subscription-based pricing model,” Navisteps Co-founder Ken Tan said, as per the report.

The Singapore-based firm was started last year and will harness the infusion to develop its work in Asia in addition to its infrastructure, according to the report.

Additional functionality for next year is also in the works such as partner connections, expenditure insights and eleventh-hour trip cancellation.

Navisteps seeks to introduce further digitization to the reporting of business costs in addition to monitoring the cost of handling expenditure reports.

The company provides “an all-in-one business expense and travel management solution,” according to the company’s website, which notes that its product collection comes with an insights dashboard, digitized expenditure reporting and travel reservation services.

Corporate travel volumes remain in a record slump as the pandemic continues. The present environment makes a precarious situation for expense management and business travel solution providers. Those in the sector, however, aren’t sitting quietly by the sidelines.

Instead, ample opportunity exists to innovate and better the corporate travel experience in expectation of corporate trips’ return per Chris Bruce, vice president of commercial at Journera.

Bruce explained to PYMNTS that live data connectivity is one area of corporate travel with the potentiality to introduce efficiencies and optimize experiences for travelers and their employers in addition to travel management firms.

Earlier this year, Jounera, a provider of live travel data, stepped into the world of corporate travel via a tie-up with travel management firm AmTrav.