Navan

Navan co-founders Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig met at Mercury Interactive in the early 2000s and later worked at HP and Opsware. In August 2012 they started their first company together, StreamOnce, which Jive Software acquired within nine months.⁠[1]

Lightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture PartnersLightspeed Venture Partners backs companies from seed through late-stage financing. Its website distinguishes Lightspeed Management Company (LSVP) from Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP): the two are separately operated investment advisers, with the U.S., European, and Israeli offices belonging to LSVP and the India and Southeast Asia offices belonging to LSIP.Open the full entry and angel investor Oren Zeev invested in StreamOnce’s seed round in 2012. After leaving Jive, the two first proposed a product to make recording and filing business expenses less painful, then pivoted to a travel booking product that rewards employees for saving their companies money on business travel.⁠[2]

In 2015 Cohen and Twig founded the company as TripActions, building a corporate travel tool that let users book, view and manage travel and expenses in a single platform. The founders date the start of the company to May 15, 2015.⁠[3][1]

The company started in a small office in Mountain View, California.⁠[2]

In 2016 TripActions signed its first customer, SurveyMonkey, and partnered with Priceline, Booking.com and Agoda for inventory. In 2017 it raised a Series A, launched a full-service online travel agency with Global Distribution System (GDS) content, and introduced a real-time travel spend reporting dashboard.⁠[3]

Following its seed, Series A and Series B financings, TripActions raised $154 million in November 2018 at a valuation of more than $1 billion; Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry joined as an investor and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated again. Its customers then included Dropbox, Lyft and Twilio, and the company had seven offices and hundreds of employees.⁠[2]

The company’s website records this financing as its Series C. That year TripActions added Expedia hotel content and introduced travel policies that adjust to real-time market conditions, along with rewards for bookings below policy.⁠[3]

In June 2019 TripActions announced $250 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation. At the time it managed more than $1.1 billion in annual travel spend for more than 2,000 customers and had nine offices and more than 700 employees.⁠[4]

That year TripActions began adopting New Distribution Capability (NDC) content, connecting directly to airlines for real-time flight inventory.⁠[3]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, with global air travel at a standstill, the company’s revenue fell to zero.⁠[1]

In 2020 the company launched the expense management product TripActions Liquid (later renamed Navan Expense) and signed enterprise customers including Unilever, Wayfair and Zoom.⁠[3]

In 2021 the company acquired the UK travel management company Reed & Mackay and entered the European market, and integrated Amadeus to run a dual-GDS model. In 2022 it formed the Navan Group through acquisitions of Comtravo in Germany, Resia in Sweden and Tripeur in India, and grew to 50 offices worldwide.⁠[3][1]

On October 12, 2022 TripActions announced a $304 million Series G at a post-money valuation of $9.2 billion, up from $7.5 billion. It comprised a $154 million equity round, with returning investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Premji InvestPremji InvestPremji Invest is an investment firm established by Azim Premji in 2006, operating across private and public markets in India and the United States, with investment returns primarily supporting the philanthropic work of the Azim Premji Foundation. Its investment areas include technology, financial services, consumer, healthcare and industrials.Open the full entry, and a $150 million structured financing from CoatueCoatueCoatue is a technology- and innovation-focused investment management firm founded by Philippe Laffont in 1999, operating in both public and private markets. Its current website lists Thomas Laffont as co-founder and chief investment officer of private investments; a Form ADV filed on July 29, 2026, disclosed regulatory assets under management of $92,705,722,582.Open the full entry.⁠[5][6]

As part of the deal, Premji Invest’s Sandesh Patnam joined the board and Coatue’s Dan Rose became a board observer. Other investors included Base Partners, Elad GilElad GilElad Gil is an entrepreneur, investor and author of High Growth Handbook. He co-founded Mixer Labs and Color, worked at Google and Twitter, runs the multistage investment firm Gil & Co, and co-hosts the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo.Open the full entry, GreenoaksGreenoaksGreenoaks is an American investment firm co-founded by Neil Mehta in 2012 and known for concentrated, long-term investing; it made an early, large bet on the Korean e-commerce company Coupang and has invested in companies including Wiz, Stripe, Databricks, and Anthropic. In May 2026, it co-led Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H funding round with Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital.Open the full entry, Zeev VenturesZeev VenturesZeev Ventures is a venture capital firm founded and managed single-handedly by Israeli-born investor Oren Zeev, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with no partners or employees; it invests mainly in software companies with Israeli connections, and its early investments include Navan, Houzz, Tipalti and Next Insurance.Open the full entry, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Addition.⁠[5]

As of the end of July 2022 TripActions had more than 2,500 employees in 60 offices worldwide. Most of its employees were in the United States; both founders are Israeli, and the company ran a development center in Tel Aviv with several dozen employees.⁠[6]

On February 7, 2023 TripActions announced that it had rebranded as Navan and consolidated its travel and expense offerings into a single “super app.” The name combines the words navigate and avant.⁠[7]

At the same time Navan integrated OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s API into its virtual travel assistant Ava and opened the app to individual business travelers signing up with a company email address, without a company-wide contract.⁠[7]

In the rebrand announcement, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben HorowitzBen HorowitzBen Horowitz is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and business author who co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Marc Andreessen in 2009. He previously led Loudcloud’s transition into Opsware and its 2007 sale to Hewlett-Packard. His writing and investing address startup management, organizational culture and the relationship between technology and cultural industries.Open the full entry said: “If Navan was available when I was an enterprise software CEO, I might still be an enterprise software CEO.”⁠[7]

In October 2024 Navan and the corporate card company Brex announced BrexPay for Navan, which embeds Brex cards directly into Navan’s travel management software and issues a virtual card number for each booking to automate travel payment reconciliation, with local-currency payments in more than 50 countries.⁠[8]

On October 29, 2025 Navan priced its initial public offering at $25 per share for 36,924,406 shares of Class A common stock: 30,000,000 shares sold by the company and 6,924,406 shares sold by existing stockholders, from which the company received no proceeds. The shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on October 30 under the symbol “NAVN,” with Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry and Citigroup as lead book-running managers.⁠[9]

The company closed its initial public offering in October 2025.⁠[3]

On September 9, 2026 Navan announced results for the second quarter of fiscal 2027, ended July 31, 2026: total revenue of $233 million, up 35% year over year; gross booking volume of $3.0 billion, up 45%; a GAAP loss from operations of $26 million; and non-GAAP income from operations of $17 million. The company said more than 50% of its AI calls ran on its own models and that Ava, its AI support agent, handled about 60% of customer interactions.⁠[10]

The same day Navan announced the acquisition of BoomPop, an AI-powered meetings and events platform started in 2023 that had supported events for approximately 250,000 people. Navan said it had previously integrated acquired companies including Reed & Mackay, Comtravo, Tripeur and, most recently, Smartrips.⁠[11]

As of November 2026 Navan’s website listed its leadership as including co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen, co-founder and CTO Ilan Twig, CFO Aurélien Nolf and President Michael Sindicich. Its board members included Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Arif Janmohamed, Mike Kourey (audit committee chair), Clara Liang (Stripe), Sandesh Patnam (Premji Invest), Shai Weiss, Anré Williams (American ExpressAmerican ExpressAmerican Express Company is a payments company headquartered in New York that issues credit and charge cards and operates its own payments network; founded in 1850, it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry) and Oren Zeev (Zeev Ventures).⁠[12]

Navan: Official website: https://navan.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

X: Public account: https://x.com/Navan (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/navan/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GetNavan (opens in a new window).⁠[3]