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 expansion 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.

Kenyan Startup, BuuPass, has received new funding from Yango Ventures, the investment arm of Yango Group. The financial terms of...

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Kenyan mobility startup BuuPass has secured an undisclosed strategic investment from Yango Ventures, marking a new phase in its plan to digitise long-distance travel across Africa.

The deal brings fresh backing from Yango Group’s newly launched USD 20 M corporate venture fund, focused on high-growth markets in sectors like B2B SaaS, fintech, and O2O platforms.

Founded in 2016 by Sonia Kabra and Wyclife Omondi, BuuPass has become a central layer of digital infrastructure for Africa’s fragmented intercity travel and logistics sector.

Its platform enables consumers to book intercity buses, trains, flights, and parcel services while equipping operators with software for inventory, payments, and fleet management. Through APIs, mobile apps, USSD, and offline sales agents, BuuPass processes transactions across multiple layers of Africa’s informal transport economy.

The company now operates in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa, working with over 150 transport providers. It processed over USD 70 M in bookings and sold 20 million tickets in 2024 alone. Last year’s acquisition of QuickBus in South Africa, on the heels of a USD 1.3 M pre-seed in 2023, bolstered its supply footprint and regional reach.

BuuPass CEO Kabra described Yango as a partner “who leans in with insight, not just capital” — a nod to the fund’s operational involvement. For Yango, it’s a bet on infrastructure as the enabler of inclusive growth in mobility. For BuuPass, it’s momentum in its bid to become the API for how Africa moves.

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