For years, business travellers have worked around rigid booking systems, patchy workflows, and expense processes that often feel more painful than the trips themselves. Navan, the Palo Alto-based company once known as TripActions, built its business on solving those frustrations. Now, after nearly a decade of rapid expansion and heavy venture funding, it is taking its next step: an initial public offering.
The company filed on Friday to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol NAVN, with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup serving as lead underwriters. Navan reported $613 million in revenue over the past year, a 32% increase, along with $7.6 billion in bookings (up 34%), spanning more than 10,000 corporate clients, including Adobe, Blue Origin, Geico, and Unilever.
Like many recent listing candidates, profitability remains a challenge. Net losses totalled $181 million over the past fiscal year, down almost half from 2024, even as losses in the most recent half-year inched higher to $100 million. Gross margins, however, are improving, rising from 60% to 68% year-over-year, suggesting the company is shifting toward more efficient growth.
The story of Navan is also the story of its founders
The story of Navan is also the story of its founders. Founded in 2015 by Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig, Navan positioned itself from the start as an alternative to legacy providers such as SAP Concur. Its central claim is that it can function as a single platform for business travel, payments, and expenses, simplifying a process that has long been fragmented across multiple tools.
“We built Navan for the road warriors, for CEOs and CFOs who understand travel’s critical importance to their strategy, for finance teams who demand precision and control, and for the assistants and program managers ensuring seamless events,” Cohen and Twig wrote in Navan’s IPO filing letter.
Technology is at the heart of that promise. Navan has heavily leveraged artificial ininformigence, developing a virtual assistant called Ava that now handles roughly half of all customer interactions. Its proprietary Navan Cognition framework underpins expense compliance and predictive travel recommconcludeations. Its ownership of much of the underlying infrastructure gives it an edge over both lumbering incumbents, such as SAP Concur, and challengers, including TravelPerk, Brex, and Ramp.
What’s next?
The IPO comes at a time when the market has warmed after several years of decline. High-profile debuts from Klarna, Figma, and Stubhub have led the wave, while crypto firms Circle and Gemini have also joined.
For Cohen, Twig, and investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Lightspeed, and Goldman Sachs, which toobtainher have provided more than $1.5 billion in backing, the offering is a chance to test whether Wall Street is ready to acquire into their broader vision.
Beyond travel, Navan has ambitions in payments and financial automation, aiming to become a cornerstone platform for enterprise spconcludeing.
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