Corporate travel and expense management startup Navan just filed to go public, revealing $613 million in trailing 12-month revenue and positioning itself to ride the hottest IPO market since 2021. The Palo Alto-based company's S-1 filing shows it's capturing serious momentum in business travel recovery while competitors scramble for market share.
Navan just dropped its IPO filing, and the numbers tell the story of a startup that's figured out how to make business travel actually work. The company filed its S-1 with the SEC Friday afternoon, planning to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol 'NAVN' with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup as lead underwriters.
The financial snapshot is compelling - $613 million in trailing 12-month revenue, up 32% year-over-year, with gross bookings hitting $7.6 billion, a 34% jump. That's serious momentum for a company serving over 10,000 customers including household names like Adobe, Unilever, and even Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture.
Navan's timing couldn't be better. The IPO market has roared back to life this year with deal activity up 56% across 156 deals, generating $30 billion in proceeds - a 23% increase from last year, according to Renaissance Capital. It's the strongest IPO environment since 2021, though still far from the Covid-era boom that saw $142 billion raised in 2021 alone.
This year's IPO wave has been dominated by AI darlings like CoreWeave and long-awaited public debuts from unicorns like Klarna's recent listing and Figma's summer IPO. StubHub just hit the NYSE this week, and the Renaissance IPO ETF is up 20% year-to-date.
CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig launched the company in 2015 as TripActions, targeting what they saw as a broken business travel ecosystem dominated by clunky legacy systems. "We saw firsthand the frustration of clunky, outdated systems," the founders wrote in their IPO letter. "Travelers were forced to cobble together solutions, wait for hours on hold to book or change travel, and negotiate with travel agents."
The pitch resonated. Navan positions itself as an "all-in-one super app" for corporate travel and expenses, and it's been doubling down on AI to differentiate from competitors. The company's virtual assistant Ava now handles roughly 50% of user interactions, while a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition powers the platform's backend intelligence.
