Business travel and expense management platform Navan fell as much as 15% on its first day of trading on the stock exchange Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN” following its successful initial public offering.
Navan’s IPO, which took place Wednesday evening, valued the business-to-business software provider at $6.2 billion, raising $923 million and putting the stock in the middle of the deal range at $25 per share. The valuation was about $3 billion lower than where private investors last valued Navan in 2022 in a $300 million round.
Launched in 2015 by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig, Navan set out to disrupt a business travel industry where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.
The Palo Alto-based company, formerly called TripActions, calls itself an “all-in-one super app” for business travel and expenses.
Customers include Geico, Zoom, Lyft, OpenAI, Unilever, Anthropic, Adobe, Christie’s and Blue Origin.
“We really care about the traveler, the road warrior,” CEO Ariel Cohen said in a CNBC interview on IPO day.
Navan was ranked No. 39 on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list this year and has been on the list for two consecutive years.
Navan’s big day is also a huge win for venture investor Oren Zeev, who runs the rare one-man VC firm and is expected to have a stake in Navan worth well over $1 billion at the IPO price, having first invested in the founders in 2013, two years before Navan came to life. “It’s a first for me,” Zeev told CNBC about an early-stage investment result resulting in a $1 billion payday. He has no office, no assistant, no one on the payroll at all, but a portfolio of 50 companies (40 where he sits on the board, including Navan).
Cohen said Navan’s focus on business travel and expenses makes it possible to support not only the largest companies in the market, but also those with as few as ten employees. The idea, regardless of size, is that any company with travelers can ensure “they don’t waste their time,” he said in his “Squawk Box” interview.
According to Cohen, traditionally booking a complex business trip can take an average of 45 minutes, but with Navan the process has been reduced to seven minutes and has resulted in a 15% savings for customers.
It has also moved further into AI, with a virtual assistant called Ava handling about 50% of user interactions, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition underpinning its platform, as well as its own cloud infrastructure.
“You’re always one click away from Ava, our chatbot, to arrange a flight, connect to a new hotel… whatever you need,” Cohen said.
Credit card swipes, company calendar entries, and photos of receipts taken on a phone can all be incorporated directly into AI analytics.
With Ava handling 50% of customer calls, Cohen says the era of long wait times at travel agents is a thing of the past, whether it’s a natural disaster or the recent airport delays and closures causing travel headaches.
‘You don’t have to wait with us. She will take care of it,” he said.
Navan has many competitors, from niche players like Expensify to business software heavyweights like Oracle and SAP.
Expensify stock has fallen in value since its 2021 IPO, falling to less than $2 per share after its $27 IPO price.
Cohen says when it comes to the competition, Navan thinks it can differentiate itself from the rest by focusing on the traveler. No one likes dealing with expense reports or spending hours on the phone with travel agents, but “that’s what we do,” he said. “We know how to support you very quickly and we know there is an interruption and we try to understand your journey as a traveler,” he added.
Navan reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million (+32%) from more than 10,000 customers, and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (+34%), according to the S-1 filing. For the July quarter, Navan posted a net loss of $38.6 million on revenue of $172 million, up about 29% year-over-year, but fell short of previous guidance for profitability.
The IPO market has come back to life in 2025, fueled by a mix of popular AI and crypto names and more mature tech companies that have grown over the past decade by funding Silicon Valley startups like Nuclear tissue, Circle, Figma And Clarna (Navan was founded in 2015).
There were 182 IPOs priced this year, up 42.2% from last year, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital, with total deal proceeds of $33.3 billion, up just under 17% from last year.
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