Corporate travel platform Navan has bought BoomPop, a two-year-old startup that uses AI to handle the messy operational side of company events — venue and vendor sourcing, RFPs, room blocks, contracts, and payments. The deal terms weren't disclosed, and BoomPop will be rebranded as Navan Events inside Navan's existing platform. No layoffs are planned.
For context on why this matters: Navan has been steadily stitching together travel booking, expense management, and payments into one system, and events were the obvious missing piece. The company has a recognizable pattern here — partner with a specialist first, then buy it once demand is proven, as it did with Smartrips in Brazil. This acquisition extends a five-year buying streak that includes Reed & Mackay, Comtravo, Resia, Tripeur, and Smartrips, each adding either capabilities or geographic reach.
BoomPop, founded in 2023, says it has handled events for more than 500,000 attendees, with clients including Accenture, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and Shopify. It also claims its approach cuts event booking costs by around 30% — a figure that hasn't been independently verified, so take it with a pinch of salt. Still, the client list is the real signal: these are companies that run a lot of offsites, conferences, and group travel, and they're already in Navan's orbit.
The timing wasn't accidental. Navan announced the deal alongside its Q2 FY2027 earnings, reporting $233 million in revenue, up 35% year over year, and raising its full-year outlook. A company doesn't usually buy an events platform on the same day it posts strong numbers unless it wants investors to read the two together.
Strategically, this puts Navan in more direct competition with meetings-and-events specialists like Cvent, which have long dominated corporate event software. It also makes Navan's platform stickier — the more of a company's travel-and-events workflow lives in one place, the harder it becomes to switch to a rival. For Navan, every offsite and conference booked through Navan Events is another reason a client won't churn.
Why should travellers care? If you book group travel for work — team offsites, client events, conference delegations — the tools you use are converging. Expect your flights, hotel room blocks, event venues, and expense reports to increasingly live in a single workflow rather than a patchwork of systems. For the people planning those trips, that could mean fewer RFPs fired into the void and faster vendor comparisons. And since Navan serves midsize companies through large enterprises, the effects will show up at plenty of workplaces over the next year or two.
For BoomPop's part, joining a larger platform gives its AI-driven event tools a much bigger distribution channel than a standalone startup could build alone. Keep an eye on whether the promised cost savings hold up once it's folded into Navan's pricing — and on how Cvent and other incumbents respond.