TripActions this year adopted a new moniker, Navan, but that marked no change in the travel management platform's acquisitive strategy, which has helped land co-founder Ariel Cohen on this list three times in the past five years.
This year, with Cohen's fourth appearance, Navan acquired its way into the booming Indian business travel market via Bengaluru-based Tripeur, a travel and expense management company with technology that Navan could "ingest and scale," Cohen wrote in a blog post at the time. That technology includes direct connections to low-cost carriers in India and automated employee expense reconciliation, and it enabled Navan to broaden local support in India to include such services as lounge access and visa facilitation, which tends to be more difficult in India compared with other markets.
The acquisition was Navan's fifth during the past two years, with the others focused on Navan's growth in Europe.
Beyond acquisitions, however, Navan this year also deepened its connections on the payment side with its new Navan Connect, a card link technology that enabled it to add its expense management features on enrolled Mastercard and Visa corporate cards. That helps solve "the challenges and limitations that historically prevented modern expense solutions to be made available outside of Silicon Valley," Visa SVP and North America head of business solutions Veronica Fernandez said upon the announcement.
Navan since parlayed that technology into a jointly branded travel and expense product with corporate card giant Citi Commercial Bank, making its expense management system initially available to Citi's U.S.-based clients, representing about $42 billion in annual charge volume.