Latest news with #ArielCohen
Travel Weekly
23-06-2025
- Business
- Travel Weekly
Navan
2024 sales: $6.1 billion (estimated)* Previous ranking: 10 Employees: 3,000 full-time 3045 Park Blvd. Palo Alto, CA 94306 Phone: (888) 505-8747 Website $6.1 billion (estimated)*103,000 full-time3045 Park Alto, CA 94306Phone: (888) 505-8747 Executives EXECUTIVES CO-FOUNDER/CEO: Ariel Cohen CO-FOUNDER/CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER: Ilan Twig PRESIDENT: Michael Sindicich CFO: Amy Butte CEO, EUROPE MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA: Michael Riegel COO: Ofer Ben-David CEO, REED & MACKAY: Fred Stratford COMPANY FACTS * Privately held company with direct sales. * Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Lightspeed. * Owns corporate agency Reed & Mackay. * Sales: 76% business, 22% other (meetings, group travel, guest travel), 2% personal. * A member of GBTA, the Institute of Travel Management, ABC Global Services and Virtuoso. DEVELOPMENTS * Enhanced generative AI-powered chatbot, Navan Cognition, which uses large language models to understand context and learn from millions of past chats for more sophisticated support in 10 languages. It can find deals, book or change flights and hotels; it understands time zones and loyalty programs. More than 150,000 chats were handled monthly, with 50% support traffic resolution. * Leveraged its 17 NDC connections with cheaper fares and more options: Up to 57% of airline fares may be missing from non-NDC platforms, potentially leading to off-platform bookings and higher costs. More than 25% of Navan flight bookings are via NDC, with customers seeing potential per-airline savings of 3.3% to 16.6%. LOOKING AHEAD * Using AI by moving beyond traditional search methods: Travelers describe their desired trip, and AI will personalize results based on their preferences, company policies and public information. * Introducing an AI-powered data analytics dashboard, providing real-time, customizable insights into performance, such as policy compliance and spending. * Expanding NDC connections to provide more affordable flight options. * The Skift and Navan survey indicates that 82% of travelers and 80% of managers said that business travel was either "an essential investment" or "a necessary cost." That means travel will be a key driver in companies' plans for growth. * Because of "the murkiness of the 2025 global economic landscape," Navan believes it's more important than ever for businesses to squeeze every available dollar of ROI from their travel programs. The company continues to leverage AI, NDC, card-link technology and other tools to help companies remove friction from the travel and expense process and save money so they can slash costs without cutting the number of trips their employees take. * Navan said its 2024 sales figure was "north of $6 billion." Travel Weekly has assigned an estimated sales figure.
Skift
20-06-2025
- Business
- Skift
Navan Moves Toward IPO With Confidential SEC Filing
Navan's first move toward an IPO has been a long time coming. Navan, a business travel tech company, said Friday it has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO – but it was a "confidential" submission and no financial details were publicly available. 'The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined,' the company said. The company was last valued at $9.2 billion during its series G venture capital raise in October 2022, a time when many private valuations were considered inflated. The IPO market has been unusually slow, but analysts believe that several offerings in recents weeks signal that the market is heating up. Navan is a corporate travel agency with a tech platform where employees at client companies can complete bookings and manage expenses. Clients include Lyft, Wayfair, Toast, Thomson Reuters, Zoom, Shopify, and more. Navan CEO Ariel Cohen in May 2024 said the company was "not far" from an IPO, though he noted the timing could be affected by market conditions and geopolitical factors outside the company's control. The company has hired two execs with IPO experience over the past year. Amy Butte joined Navan as chief financial officer last June, and was previously CFO at the New York Stock Exchange during its IPO. Rich Liu, an early chief revenue officer for Navan, returned to the company as CEO of Navan Travel. Liu previously helped two companies go public. Cohen and CTO Ilan Twig founded Navan in 2015. The company now has more than 3,000 employees and more than 10,000 clients, according to its website. The company has raised well over $1 billion in venture capital. Business travel tech platforms have been gaining traction as companies have been looking to streamline various operations post-pandemic. TravelPerk has raised over $700 million, most recently $200 million in January. Expense management platform Ramp has raised over $2 billion, with reports that it's seeking more funding at a valuation of $16 billion. Several others have been raising money to target their respective geographic regions.
Bloomberg
13-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Israel Has Destroyed Iran's Nuclear Arsenals Says Ariel Cohen
Israel launched strikes across Iran, targeting nuclear facilities and killing top military commanders, in a major escalation against its chief adversary that risks sparking a broad war in the Middle East. The strikes were far more extensive than those Israel carried out against Iran last year and underscored the country's growing assertiveness, as well as its military and intelligence capabilities. The attacks caused oil to surge, and investors to buy havens such as gold and US Treasuries, with the risk of this conflict expanding and hitting the global economy. Dr Ariel Cohen, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council reports on what how this will change the middle east. (Source: Bloomberg)
CNBC
10-06-2025
- Business
- CNBC
39. Navan
Founders: Ariel Cohen (CEO), Ilan TwigLaunched: 2015Headquarters: Palo Alto, CaliforniaFunding: $2 billion (PitchBook)Valuation: $9.2 billion (PitchBook)Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, machine learningIndustry: Enterprise technology, travelPrevious appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 1 (No. 38 in 2024) Business travel has long been associated with clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows. But Navan is betting that simplicity, and AI, can modernize the industry. The Palo Alto-based travel and expense startup, formerly called TripActions, has transformed itself into what it calls the first "all-in-one super app" for corporate travel and expenses. It can handle everything from flight bookings to hotel recommendations to real-time expense tracking. Moreover, the platform gives companies a consolidated view of employee travel and spending. The platform has been catching on. Navan said it has grown bookings twentyfold since the pandemic, that it ended 2024 with a record $550 million in revenue, and is on track to hit profitability this year. It now has 11,000 customers, including Unilever, Adobe, Christie's, Blue Origin and Geico. It's also processing corporate travel spending via Navan Connect, a card-linking technology that lets businesses offer automated expense management and reconciliation without having to change corporate card providers. Behind all that growth is a strong push into AI. Navan's virtual assistant, named Ava, now fields about 150,000 support chats a month and resolves more than half without human involvement. The company says the virtual assistant matches human agents on customer satisfaction ratings. Navan also recently introduced Concierge by Ava, a tool that uses real-time data and user travel patterns to suggest hyper-personalized hotel bookings. Those AI features played a starring role last summer during the Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage. The company said Ava helped shoulder the surge in support volume, keeping wait times down and satisfaction scores up. The company also struck unexpected partnerships, including one with competitor Brex to integrate travel booking with BrexPay, and launched co-branded offerings with Citizens and Rho. Still, competition is fierce. Navan is jostling for market share against expense and travel startups like fellow Disruptor Ramp, TravelPerk, and Brex, as well as incumbents like SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel. It's a crowded field — and Navan's all-in-one approach means it's fighting on multiple fronts.
Skift
22-05-2025
- Business
- Skift
Navan Takes a Step Towards an IPO
U.S. stock markets are definitely not cooperating with Navan's long-held plans to IPO. Navan has hired underwriters for an IPO that could value the company at $8 billion. The move toward an IPO, reported by Reuters, follows Navan officials discussing such a prospect several times over the last couple of years. Goldman Sachs is the lead underwriter, according to the report, and an IPO, depending on market conditions, would take place in the fourth quarter at the earliest. A year ago, Navan CEO Ariel Cohen said the company is "not far" from an IPO, though he noted the timing could be affected by market conditions and geopolitical factors outside the company's control. In April 2024, Navan brought back former Chief Revenue Officer Rich Liu as CEO of Navan Travel and appointed former New York Stock Exchange CFO Amy Butte to its board, CNBC reported following an interview with Cohen in May 2024. Navan offers travel management, expense and payments services. Both Liu and Butte have IPO experience. Cohen, also a Navan co-founder, has been discussing IPO prospects for several years. In 2022, the company filed confidential IPO paperwork with the aim of going public at a $12 billion valuation. Business Insider reported in the summer of 2023 that Navan would seek to go public in about a year, subject to market conditions. Correction: The CNBC interview with Navan CEO Ariel Cohen took place in May 2024, not May 2025. The article has been updated to reflect that.
