Celebrating Navan’s Landmark IPO

What a difference five years makes.

Today, we’re honored to celebrate Navan’s first day as a public company on the Nasdaq exchange – a meaningful and exciting milestone for a ten-year-old company that’s only just getting started. Few startups make it this far, and yet, for Navan, it feels like just another step on a journey that has had more than its fair share of ups and downs.

Five years ago, the world looked very different.

When Covid hit, the world stopped. As we sheltered in place, pundits declared the era of permanent remote work and the death of business travel. For Navan – a business travel startup – revenue plunged by 95% as global travel ground to a halt. It was a life-or-death moment for the company.

Navan’s founders, Ariel and Ilan, did what the very best founders do: they dug in, they fought, they innovated. And as the world reopened, they didn’t just survive – they thrived.

Business travel has rebounded. And so has Navan. The world has recognized that in-person connections matter. That business is personal. That relationships are built over a meal, that looking your counterpart in the eye and shaking hands builds trust, and that hugs, high fives and the clink of a glass are the best way to celebrate a win.

Navan is central to this. Over the past decade, they’ve built a modern, global business travel and expense platform. With AI at its core, the Navan engine provides a magical experience for road warriors, handling booking, expense, payments, and travel support.

A decade ago we partnered with Ariel and Ilan when we invested in their seed round. It was Day 1 for the company and they had a vision to modernize business travel. Hard to believe, but when Navan was founded, the large majority of business travel was still booked offline – via phone calls or emails to travel agents. The industry was clunky and outdated.

From the beginning, Ariel and Ilan saw an opportunity to transform the massive business travel industry by delivering online booking, AI-based travel support, and an intuitive, modern web and mobile platform. And central to this, they saw an opportunity to take nascent machine learning and AI technologies and embed them into the product to deliver a highly personalized, contextual and seamless experience for travelers, from search to customer service.

What the founders saw early was that AI wasn’t just an enabler for better customer support. Rather, it was an opportunity to transform an industry that was historically people-centric. Legacy travel platforms traditionally had to linearly add travel agents as they added customers. Ariel and Ilan saw an opportunity to use AI to first assist, and then replace traditional travel agents. This not only led to faster resolution of travel issues in many cases, but also transformed the business – allowing Navan to achieve software-level gross margins instead of service-based ones.

As the Navan platform took off, so did our partnership with the founders. We co-led their Series A financing, then led their Series B financing and continued to invest in subsequent rounds as the company grew.

Today, in 2025, after ringing the Nasdaq bell and beginning its journey as a public company, Navan has achieved an incredible amount of success. Over 10K customers trust Navan to take care of their employees when they’re on the road. And with a CSAT score of 96% and NPS of 43, Navan is loved by its users. We believe they deliver on the complex needs of travelers, the businesses who fund their trips, and the suppliers — airlines, hotels, rail carriers — who make travel happen.

In the ten years since its founding, Navan has grown from a nascent startup to a company with over $600M in revenue and with nearly 3,000 global employees. Travel & Expense is a massive market and we believe Navan has a huge advantage to capture it. Their headstart in AI and inventory has been a decade in the making, and we expect more innovations to come.

Lightspeed has been a proud partner of Navan since 2015. I’ve been honored to serve on Navan’s board of directors for the past 10 years.

The COVID years were tough, but they also strengthened Navan and its founders, testing their resolve and proving their ability to build an enduring company through one of the hardest challenges a startup can face. Today, the company is better for it.

On the heels of today’s milestone, Navan is still just getting started. We are grateful to Ariel, Ilan and the Navan team for choosing to partner with us on this journey, and we are excited for what lies ahead.

The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. The views expressed here are those of the individual Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. (“Lightspeed”) personnel and are not the views of Lightspeed or its affiliates; other market participants could take different views.

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