Navan’s IPO Marks a New Era in T&E — Here's Our Story

Today, Navan becomes a publicly listed company on Nasdaq. As we take this next step, we remain driven by a single mission: to make travel easy for every frequent traveler. In the letter below, co-founders Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig reflect on the power of in-person connections, the vision for Navan, and their thoughts on the company’s future.

We all know: Business travelers want to focus on being there, not getting there. Their time is valuable. Their time is money. And, in an era where AI can supercharge their productivity, as well as the efficiency of the companies they work for, only technologies that amplify their success have a place.

My personal “business travel is broken” moment happened in 2013. I had landed in Odesa, Ukraine, on a freezing-cold night, exhausted and needing to prepare for the next day’s meetings. My hotel reservation had gone missing. No one could fix the problem because the travel agency I booked through was closed for the night, and my booking tool was useless.

Meanwhile, the digital world was booming: Food delivery and rideshares were available on demand and 24/7. But corporate travel and expense (T&E) was stuck in an analog world of endless wait times, email chains, and receipts. Despite being one of the most costly line items for a business, it was completely broken. I didn’t know anyone who actually liked their T&E solution or talked about getting good service from their corporate travel agency. Travelers, businesses, and the industry were all losing.

Out of our frustration, a vision was born. We knew that we could build a better solution — one that understood travelers’ needs, and treated them perfectly, so we started Navan to combine comprehensive travel inventory with cutting-edge technology. We recognized that the future of travel wasn’t just about digitizing the old ways, but about fundamentally reimagining the entire experience through the lens of AI.

At Navan, we are the champions of frequent travelers and everyone who supports them. We champion the people who can’t spend hours searching for flights and hotels, sitting on hold with support agents, and inputting expenses into a spreadsheet. Stakeholders — from CFOs, to travel managers, to admins and accountants — need visibility and control over spend, but they don’t have time to approve every small purchase request. Suppliers want to move inventory — flights, hotels, cars, rail — and to build relationships directly with their customers and travelers. All of them want technology to drive change and momentum, but that’s nearly impossible when outdated technology is still standard.

A successful T&E solution gives all three groups the tools to win. But primarily offline legacy solutions weren’t helping anyone win. They still don’t.

The T&E world needed to be modernized and digitized because employees need to travel for companies to thrive. Sure, video meetings have their place. But, as frequent travelers ourselves, we’ve personally experienced just how critical it is to shake a hand, share a meal, and brainstorm face-to-face. Business travel is foundational for retaining clients. For team-building. For the future of the business world.

That’s something that will never change, because personal connections make us who we are. Connections require travel. And making travel business-friendly means making it time- and cost-efficient.

For decades, legacy solutions have simply maintained the status quo while raking in huge fees. Their travelers still have to spend hours on basic logistics; admins still have to waste time with busywork, such as manually inputting receipts and filling expense reports; suppliers still have to work with legacy travel management companies that often don’t represent their products well or even display their “full” inventory. It’s no wonder these solutions have left armies of frustrated travelers in their wake and are causing businesses to waste time and money.

So, in our reinvention, Navan had to do everything differently. We started with a simple idea: Make life easier for everyone in the network, especially the frequent business traveler. Bring business travel into the 21st century.

Navan was engineered from the ground up with AI at its core, guiding our platform’s development to create a seamless and intelligent experience. This approach anticipates user needs and streamlines every aspect of business travel, setting us apart from solutions that treat AI as an afterthought.

The Navan team has built a new category of business software by recruiting top talent and fostering a self-directed company culture. With the freedom to build from scratch, we leapfrogged antiquated infrastructure to deliver a modern and delightful solution, ensuring AI powers a personalized and intuitive travel experience.

With Navan, the entire network wins. Travelers book trips easily and quickly, skip tedious receipt-tracking, benefit from fast, friendly, and accurate support, and earn rewards for saving their companies money, which they can redeem for personal travel on Navan. Admins avoid an inbox of petty approval requests, cut down significantly on accounting work, and use real-time data to head off spending issues before they become problems. And our extensive inventory, at some of the best prices, is packaged in a beautiful interface.

So it’s no surprise that we’ve amassed tons of dedicated customers and millions of passionate fans. From small startups to Fortune 500 companies, businesses have partnered with us to make their employees’ lives easier through tech-enabled, hyper-efficient management of travel, payments, and expenses. Once they get a taste of what the T&E process can be, they never want to go back. We’ve grown along with them, entering new markets and completing acquisitions to expand our suite of offerings.

We found out just how resilient we are during the pandemic, when travel — and our revenue — went to zero. But our belief in the power of in-person connections runs so deep that we knew travel would return. So we doubled down. Even at the height of the pandemic, we enriched our offerings and added customers who were fed up with the high cost and limited functionality of their legacy solutions.

We also supercharged customer choice and savings with even more New Distribution Capability (NDC) connections. And we opened our automated expense management platform to companies without them having to switch credit cards, something said to be impossible. We knew we’d built the all-in-one platform for the future of business travel, with AI at its core.

Being all in on generative AI has paid off. We now deliver trip options so personalized that the average booking time is seven minutes, compared to the industry average of 45. Our AI-enabled support agent acts as a personal concierge, helping travelers make changes on the fly, collect receipts, and call hotels to notify them of late check-ins or ensure payment methods are on file.

Today, Navan has become synonymous with smarter and modern travel. Our winning network has seen significant increases in adoption rates, savings, and satisfaction, along with huge declines in the time required for booking trips, managing expenses, and closing the books. Our users know that each part of their travel experience will be better with the Navan touch. Every hour of every day, our sophisticated solution delivers on our straightforward mission: Make travel easy for every frequent traveler.

We’re just getting started. Business needs change, technology evolves, and we will evolve with it, surprising users with new features and tackling future obstacles before they even arise.

We have reached this milestone today only because of the collective effort of thousands of brilliant people. Together, we’re not just making history; we’re shaping the future.

See you on the road.