Rebranding of TripActions as Navan, ChatGPT integration for expense reports

TripActions plans to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT capabilities into its online platform so customers can easily submit expense reports, a move that aims to snag market share.

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According to the company, it will also consolidate its travel, corporate card, and expenses services into one app under the new name of Navan, announced Tuesday. In addition, the app will be available to individuals with a business email address, the company said. Up until now, TripActions travel-booking tools were only available through corporate accounts.

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With ChatGPT capabilities built in, the platform’s chatbot will be able to learn a user’s preferred airlines, hotels and restaurants, and incorporate these options into a proposed itinerary, while using natural-language models to respond to voice commands, said TripActions co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen.

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Furthermore, ChatGPT will write, test and fix the code behind the app, constantly improving its operational efficiency through data analytics, Mr. Cohen said.

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The eight-year-old company's approach grew from workers' frustration with expense-reporting software tools, which often require users to manually enter figures from airline, hotel, taxi, and restaurant receipts.

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“The time and effort that employees spend on expenses and the time it takes to get reimbursed are frequently complaints from employees," says Liz Herbert, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

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TripActions has streamlined the process by automating receipt scanning with an artificial-intelligence-powered smartphone app that automatically categorizes items from printed receipts and matches them with credit card charges. It also works with digital receipts. That way, the expense report is generated during the trip as expenses are incurred, Mr. Cohen said.

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Business-to-business software is generally designed to serve the company, rather than the employees, Mr. Cohen said. This is about maximizing company efficiency, but not really about workers. 

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Through consolidation of services, Navan will enable employees to manage bookings and expenses from a single platform that searches for available travel options, tracks every transaction on a corporate card, and generates expense reports automatically.

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As a result of the gap between the business travel apps employees are accustomed to and the consumer apps they use for booking, family vacations, and night outs, Cohen believes the market opportunity lies in bridging the gap.

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"AI helps you create the kind of software I'm referring to," Mr. Cohen said. "This is how business software should be."

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Some of the biggest investors in the startup world are paying attention to that strategy. TripActions raised an equity funding round of $154 million in October, including capital from returning investor Andreessen Horowitz, and an additional $150 million through a structured financing agreement with Coatue Management LLC. The company is currently valued at over $9 billion on the private market.

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It's kind of like this weird anomaly where consumer travel changed a lot and business travel remained the same," said Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. The new Navan app provides a "better way of doing expenses," Horowitz said, by allowing travelers to input transactions in real time.

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According to Trade Algo, TripActions still has a long way to go before it can catch SAP Concur, the market leader.

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In terms of revenue, SAP Concur, owned by enterprise-technology giant SAP SE, holds 40% of the global travel-and-expense management market, according to research firm International Data Corp.

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Additionally, SAP Concur has begun using AI in its travel and expense software, which can detect spend anomalies and issues that are hard to detect, according to Charlie Sultan, president of Concur Travel. Using AI has reduced reimbursement times to approximately three to four days from more than 10 days, among other benefits, he added.

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Along with Expensify, Rydoo and Coupa, Oracle Corp. and Workday Inc. offer expense apps incorporated into broader enterprise resource planning platforms.

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Over the next three years, IDC expects the market to expand 7.5%, from $2.5 billion this year to $3.2 billion by 2026.

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“In the travel-and-expenses space, data management will be the new battlefield for software vendors,” said IDC Research Director Kevin Permenter, referring to capabilities such as analytics and application programming interfaces, which link programs together. In addition to good functionality, Mr. Permenter said, "users must be able to move data easily and quickly within your software."