Corporate travel and expense management platform Navan fell by as much as 15% on the first trading day of 2019. Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN” after a successful initial public offering.
Navan’s IPO, priced Wednesday night, raised $923 million, valuing the business-to-business software vendor at $6.2 billion, with shares settling at $25 per share, the midpoint of the trading range. This valuation was about $3 billion lower than the last $300 million round that private investors valued Navan in 2022.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig, Navan aimed to transform the travel sector, where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.
The Palo Alto-based company, formerly known as TripActions, calls itself an “all-in-one super app” for corporate travel and expenses.
Customers include Geico, Zoom, Lyft, OpenAI, Unilever, Anthropic, Adobe, Christie’s, Blue Origin, and more.
“We really care about the traveler, the business traveler,” CEO Ariel Cohen said in a CNBC interview on the day of the IPO.
Navan is ranked 39th on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, marking his second consecutive year on the list.
Navan’s sunny day is also a big win for venture investor Oren Zeeb, who runs a rare one-man venture capital firm and first invested in the founder in 2013, two years before Navan was born, and was expected to own Navan shares worth more than $1 billion at the IPO price. Zeev told CNBC about earning a $1 billion salary from early-stage investment results. He doesn’t have an office, an assistant, or a payroll manager, but he has a portfolio of 50 companies (including Navan, he’s on the board of 40 companies).
Cohen said Navan’s focus on business travel and expense reimbursement allows it to support not only the largest companies in the market, but also companies with as few as 10 employees. The idea is to allow any business with travelers, regardless of size, to make sure “they’re not wasting their time,” he said in an interview on “Squawk Box.”
According to Cohen, while traditional methods could take an average of 45 minutes to book a complex trip, Navan has reduced the process to seven minutes, resulting in 15% savings for customers.
It’s also taking its AI efforts further, with a virtual assistant named Ava handling about 50% of user interactions, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition supporting its platform and its own cloud infrastructure.
“From Ava, our chatbot, you can always book a flight, connect to a new hotel, or do whatever you need with one click,” says Cohen.
Credit card swipes, company calendar items, and photos of receipts taken with your phone can all be used directly for AI analysis.
With Ava handling 50% of customer conversations, Cohen says the days of long hold times with travel agents are a thing of the past, whether it’s natural disasters or recent airport delays and closures that are causing travel headaches.
“You don’t have to wait together. She will take care of it,” he said.
Navan has many competitors, from niche players like Expensify to enterprise software giants like Oracle and SAP.
Expensify stock has fallen sharply since its 2021 IPO, dropping to less than $2 per share after an IPO price of $27.
When it comes to competition, Cohen said he believes Navan’s focus on travelers will set it apart from others. No one likes spending hours on expense reports or on the phone with travel agents, but “that’s what we do,” he said. “We know how to support you quickly, we understand there will be disruptions, and we strive to understand your journey as a traveler,” he added.
According to its S-1 filing, Navan posted 12-month revenue of $613 million (up 32%) and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (up 34%) from more than 10,000 customers. In the July quarter, Navan posted a net loss of $38.6 million on revenue of $172 million. This was an increase of approximately 29% compared to the same period last year, but profitability fell short of previous plans.
The IPO market is booming in 2025, supported by a mix of high-profile AI and crypto companies and more mature tech companies that grew out of Silicon Valley startup funding over the past decade. coreweave, circle, figma and Klarna (Navan was founded in 2015).
There were 182 priced IPOs this year, an increase of 42.2% from last year, and total transaction revenue rose just under 17% from last year to $33.3 billion, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital.
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