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For
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Friday, July 24, it's Brew Markets Daily and Diamondbury. One of my passions is travel, which I do for fun at every possible opportunity. But I do a lot for work too. I'm constantly hopping onto planes, trains and automobiles for board meetings, to look at deals, to go to conferences, and of course, to roam for interesting market ideas to talk about here on Brew Markets when we talk a lot about travel stocks here. But I was particularly delighted to have the chance to sit down with Arielle Cohen, the co founder and CEO of one travel industry company I frankly hadn't paid much attention to before. That's Navon, the AI powered business travel and expense platform that's looking to transform that painful process of booking corporate travel and submitting receipts into a seamless experience. Well, Navon went public on the NASDAQ in October last year and the stock is up since then. What really caught my eye is that the share price is up now. That is despite the SaaS apocalypse that's impacted other software names, meaning Navarre reached a market cap today of around 7 billion. And while the biggest AI players who are seen to threaten many software names are looming out there, they have become advanced clients, flipping the traditional narrative on its head. Well, it was a fun conversation and I was pleased to have Ariel Cohen join me here in the studio. Ariel Cohen, I got to tell you, I am a rabidly enthusiastic traveler.
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B
Yes.
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A
And Navan is possibly the one travel company I've heard about the least. I can cover this all day, so I'm really excited to dig in here. I think I may remember you more as Tripp Action. We'll talk about your rebranding, but CEO, Co Founder, in your own words, for people who like me, did not know enough about your company, describe what you do.
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Yes, we actually view ourselves as really making sure that this is happening, that the in person connections that people are meeting for business, for any other thing. So it's all about that. We are really, from the day we started the company, we believe in this thing, the in person connections making sure that people can focus on debt and not all of the things that are happening to you while you are traveling. So in a very, very simple way, you can book your trips through us. We are managing it for your employer. You can expense, you can pay for your trips. But the entire idea is not to focus on this and really bringing you here.
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So let's talk about what that means in terms of products you founded in 2015.
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Yes.
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Name them as trip action.
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Yes.
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And walk through. Paint the picture. I've got my cell phone in studio which is a bit cheeky. But if I had your app on my ph now describe what it would look like for folks.
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B
Super, super easy to use. It is probably. You mentioned that you cover Traveler as well. It's probably the best product out there to plan to book your trip, to support yourself while you're on the go. And then when you're coming back to just everything is easy. I'm talking about expense management.
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Yeah.
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So you come to the product, the product knows you kind of knows in advance what you are likely to and
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what your employer's budget is. Right.
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Exactly.
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For your travel. Because this is so folks understand this is employer led product and employees are using.
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It's true. And something very unique about Navan is that we looked at this. We know that we need to sell it to a company. But the person that we really care about is the employee that is traveling, the ea, the executive assistant that somebody sometimes supports, the execs and then everybody that are involved in these things. So we really, really believe that all of these people need to have really good product. We measure ourselves like a consumer brand. We care about nps, cs. We assume that although the employee is being told to use that product, they have a choice. They can actually find an excuse to book outside, which is a very big part of this thing. So we want them to love the product. And one of the main reasons that they love the product. It takes almost no time to book in. Average it's seven minutes to book an entire business trip, which tends to be complex. When you want to change it, you're actually chatting with Eva, which is actually our AI bot that will support you in seconds will change your entire trip. You're stuck in the airport. It will find a solution immediately. So really, really making sure that you'll be okay. And expense management is completely automated. You are using our own credit card. You swipe it, it's all automated. Even if you decided not to use our credit card, we knew how to automate it. So you basically we remove all of the stuff, all of the Stuff out of business travel. So you love it and you kind of mentioned the budget for companies. So we save in average for companies 15% on their entire travel budget. So it actually means that if you spend $100 million a year on travel we are saving you $15 million. It's a lot of money. But the way that we do it, we actually not having like these strict policies and all of these things. If you are willing to book below the company's budget what the company was telling you to do, we're actually rewarding you, the individual.
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Yeah.
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With personal trips. So you can later book your personal trip through us.
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There we go.
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Using these rewards. So that's how we save money.
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We're going to come back to that as. Because a lot of what you're saying resonates and talk a bit more about who your enterprise customer is because you just threw out there. If you're spending as a business 100 million bucks on travel, that's a very large Fortune 500 style company. We're talking about who are your customers.
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So we are actually supporting everybody from SMBs. You are who are a product led growth. So you can be a company with 10 employees, 15 employees. We're going to support you. You can come to our website and start using it. But we are also supporting companies like Unilever and Netflix and Visa. Pretty big companies that are out there. And because we focused on the individual, this product is relevant. It's the same product no matter you're a very small company or a very
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big company and talk to me about who it is that your sales force is selling to. First of all, how big is your sales force? Because a lot of when we take a step back, a lot of SaaS, companies, software as business have been really trying to figure out where to spend their money. And building out their salesforce has been a sort of surprising area in which that they've doubled down despite productivity gains. With AI, how many salespeople do you have and who in an organization are they selling to directly?
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Yeah, first of all I think that we have one. We are kind of known for this. One of the best sales teams in B2B. So it's something that took us some time to build and we have a fairly complex sale because the first that will care about the travel budget is actually the cfo. It is a pretty big part of the P and L and especially the OPEX. So it's this thing that you know, CFOs will come and let's say that there is some issue in this quarter. So kind of the dumb way to do it is to do a travel freeze. The problem when you do these things is that you are basically preventing your business from growing. You know, the people that are usually traveling are the salespeople, are your execs, are your business development people. This is how you do an M and A. This is how you are hired the next exec. So CFOs cares a lot about it. We sell to procurement as well because everybody do. There is sometimes in big companies, a business travel team. So it's an entire team. They care about policy, but they also care about safety, where their employees are. There is this concept of duty of care. You really need to know where your employees are and then help them if something happens. So we do sell to this audience. But and this is really, really important, we emphasize the traveler's experience. So we emphasize that your sales team will be way more effective.
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Yeah.
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And your employees will stop complaining about how hard it is to expense or how hard it is.
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It's really hard. I'm not going to disclose. There's one business I'm on the board of and I will tell you the vendor that is used there. It takes me hours to submit expenses and I am definitely one of the more tech savvy, more compliant people. So it's an and employees to get a vote. They are pushing to have it changed out if it's too annoying.
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It's 100%. Like we reported last quarter that we grew the usage of the platform by 50% and our revenue by 40%. And we are kind of a late stage company. We're already public. We went public this year. Our revenue is pretty high. So to grow at that rate, it means that companies are really fed up with what they're using today. And what they're using today is a combination of basically software from the 90s that is connected. It's a workflow kind of software. It's kind of how people thought about stuff really ages ago. Connected to a travel agency. And this travel agency is not entirely connected well to this software. So the employees are finding themselves either just booking outside and doing whatever they want to or booking in the platform because they don't have a choice, and then calling a travel agent, sending an email, fighting with the system. So a lot of frustration and the employees are actually coming to their employers and telling them either I'm booking outside and I'm doing whatever I want to, but then the company is losing control or I'm not using it. And that's really what drives. Drives the van.
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Let's talk about how this translates into some of your numbers. You just mentioned your 40% revenue growth in June. You had your most recent earnings as of the time of recording, very strong earnings. The street reaction. I read a lot of your analyst reports. You've got 15 analysts who cover you all. 15 are either a buyer, a strong buyer on your stock. But what struck me in amongst all this is I looked at your customer list and anthropic is one of them.
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Yeah.
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And that is despite the fact that when you describe your business model, you almost seem like the poster child for the kind of business that there is one view that would be at risk from the lights of anthropic displacing.
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Yeah.
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So talk to us about why that AI displacement risk doesn't seem to be impacting your stock. And there's something called the headless future for SaaS that ties into it. Can you explain that?
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Yeah. First of all, you know, it's not just anthropic. Most of the AI companies out there are using US OpenAI cursor anthropic, most of them. And there is a reason for that. And it's kind of what I said at the beginning. Business travel is what drives your business. It's super important. Companies are spending a lot of money on it and they are also putting a lot of attention to it. So if you are growing like the way that AI grows today, you're going to travel and you're going to travel to a lot of different places and travel will be really important for you. So that's the first thing before we even get into technology. The second thing, travel generally, but definitely corporate travel is extremely complex and nuanced. You need to, if you run a global travel company, you need to be connected to everything, everywhere. And connected means agreements with airlines, agreements with hotel chains, agreements with aggregators to do that, by the way, to sell in the right place. When I'm in London versus New York, you need to be incorporated, licensed in London and in New York and everywhere on this planet. So we actually built over the years, we call it Navaln Cloud, the best travel platform on the planet. The connectivity that we have in the system is to everything. If it is out there, it could be a hotel that comes from booking.com, it could be a low cost carrier in India, it could be the bus in India. It's everything that is out there. We are supporting it. And then when you top it with what is very unique to Navan, our AI platform, it's a homegrown AI platform. You're making it super efficient. You have the employees really getting what they want to build. You have EVA that supports you. I'll talk later about Navan Edge, which is our new product that is really our AI product. So for an AI company, any lycanthropic to your point to build that, it's crazy. Can you vibe code some nice UI to book your trip? Probably. Can you connect to all of this, make some sense into it? Putting a corporate policy, putting duty of care, all of these things super complicated. If there was a way to vibe code it, I wouldn't have employed so many travel agents, operations people incorporate all over the world. And this is where Navan and mentioned our share price or buy what the analysts and everybody that is following Navan are getting that we really created something unique in the AI industry which is an orchestration between AI and when people need to intervene. So when you chat with us to book your trip, it can start with AI, it can end with an agent and it's completely seamless. It's not that you explain yourself again and again and again. Completely seamless supports the efficiency, supports a unique pricing model, supports our gross margins. You can see that we have a tech gross margins while we are running a travel company.
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Yeah, let's talk about those gross margins. 72% plus some seasonality. It can go higher. So the gross profit margin profile you have Ariel is very strong. You are spending though a lot on sales and marketing and on R and D. So when I look at the operating margin level, you've still got some room to grow efficiencies there or to get some operating leverage. Talk about your spend on R and D. Yeah, sure.
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Actually R and D, I think we are very efficient. We are running a lot of products in Avan. So we have our main travel product, what we are calling Navan Classic. We have our expense management product, we have our payments, product meeting and events, vip, each of these things. Think about it like in Amazon we have the traveler. The traveler is very loyal to us to use Navan for each of their traveler needs. And we'll keep giving them different products, all of them run through our AI kind of platform to give them the best thing that they need to have when they need us to hold their hand. This is kind of VIP C level travel when they have their trip to New York, from London to New York, when they have the next kind of big event. All of these things are actually product led. Usually have a lot of people involved in this we changed it. Our gross margins actually last quarter were 75 and this thing is actually going, trending up. So super, super efficient. So I'm actually very happy with our R and D spend and probably you'll see us continuing to add more products. So much more investment in R and
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D. Let's take a break and when we come back, more of my conversation with Ariel Cohen.
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A
this episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for from a browse to a bike ride this summer. Find more on Facebook. Now back to my conversation with Arielle Cohen, co founder and CEO of Navan. So talk to us about Navarn Edge, which you alluded to. Yes, what's going on there?
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So we are always asking ourselves what is the next thing for that traveler? And when we started the company we knew that we want to perfect the experience but without Genai it can take you so far. So we always had machine learning to kind of sort the search results correctly and really get to know you, personalize it for you. Genai allowed us to first of all have a chat but also know you. So we have our own memory component, we have our own model. We know you, we know you on the level that we automatically creating your loyalty wallet. So when you connect to Navanage we're going to realize that you have this status in United Airlines, that status in Marriott and then everything you're coming and think about it like your assistant that will plan your trip with you. It's everything in your trip like flights, car, hotels, restaurants, events, everything. It will tell you, hey, I see that you have an extra night in New York. Do you want us to find you a nice event? I see that our three other cores coworkers that are traveling with you. Do you want us to find you A restaurant. So it's really cutting edge personal assistant. It is. Everybody can download it. You don't need to be an Avana customer. Your employer doesn't have to use us.
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Interesting.
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So it goes after what the industry is kind of calling. Going rogue is where the employee is basically saying, I'm not going to use this thing. You're not going to let me go because of it. So I'm going to use the best thing for me out there. And a Vantage is really the best thing out there for you. It's kind of almost like whether you have a personal assistant or not, you now have.
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So that's going to help you get scale.
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Yes.
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And that's where ultimately we would see the operating leverage come through. But you're also your eyes wide open. You are disrupting and I am sure annoying a lot of people in the established travel industry. So have you woken up some bears? Have people been coming to you saying, look, we want to buy you?
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Yes. So actually regarding disruption, we are really disrupting the old model. We are disrupting these dinosaurs like ConCare, American Express, EWT, all of these names and they're irrelevant. You know, they didn't innovate for a very, very, very long time. They are giving a product that nobody likes. Usually if you do that, somebody will disrupt you. What we are doing extremely well with the industry. We are working with the airlines to actually bring their product to our travelers in an extremely personalized way. So it's something that actually airlines like. We are connecting to airlines directly, which is very unique for Navan. We are the leader in connecting the airlines directly, which allows them to really show you're sitting in a United Business Class, Polaris versus Delta Business Class, Delta one. And we can show you the difference. We will show you a picture. We're going to tell you this flight has a tendency to be. This flight has a tendency to get canceled. You can only do these things if you are connected to the airlines directly and not using aggregators. So there is a real win win between the company that is saving money, the employee that is getting rewarded, that is getting the best service, the best product that is out there, and the airlines, the hotels that can actually market the stuff to the company and to the employees in the most direct way possible. So as a disruptor, we're really disrupting these people that are just irrelevant. But for the industry, we're actually not a disruptor. We are really working together to bring the best product to the customer.
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But for the concurs with the American expresses of the world. And look, I'm just going to, I'm speculating here, but if I had their kinds of balance sheet and their ability to buy, I'd be knocking on your door.
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Yeah.
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So I mean, have those conversations happened?
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B
Yeah. Obviously I will not comment on these kind of things, but I will tell you what is the ambition of, of me and Elan. Elan is my co founder. We want to build the biggest, the best global travel company.
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And would you buy other companies in order to get there faster?
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We always acquired. The last few years we actually slowed it down a little bit. As you know, in a growth kind of startup, say it was harder years to raise money. So we slowed it down now that we went public and we have an extremely strong balance sheet. You saw us already buying something in Brazil recently, like a month ago. You're going to see us buying more.
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Talk about the acquisition, if you don't mind. Ariel, what did you buy and why in Brazil?
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So I mentioned earlier that travel is extremely complex. It is global and there is huge sensitivity to inventory. So let's say that I have a United Airlines agreement in New York. It doesn't mean that I have a United Airlines agreement in Brazil. It doesn't mean that I can buy you the United Airlines ticket with the right price, with the right service, with the right stuff around it. So you see us over the years sometimes incorporating in locations, sometimes buying somebody there, but it will always be somebody. That's the case of Brazil that has the same similar concept of Navan. It will be online, it would be new, it would be very much user focused. So what we bought there is a travel agency with a product that is very similar to Navan. This actually travel agency was already a partner of Navan. So when we are servicing our customers in Brazil, it was actually through them and now they are part of Navan. So it means that companies that have employees in Brazil, companies that are established in Brazil will be able to use the Navan platform across the globe.
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A
And is there a future in which Navan expands beyond the core travel capability and takes on expense management or enterprise task for other categories like reimbursing employees for telephony and mobile?
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We are, you know, you can do it in advance. So basically, you know, there are other platforms like Brex and Ramp that are doing that. We were never into let's be the Next bank or erp. What excites us is what I said at the beginning to bring people together. And it's less about erp, it's less about let's be the office of the C the CEO. We are always excited about the trip and when you're going to see us expand it would be to more types of things that are happening while you travel. So I've mentioned restaurants earlier. Booking your dinner super important for us. Fairly new functionality in the van, booking your next event. I think that in the era of AI when people will start to probably have more time, I think that you're going to see people care about in person connections even more. You see people combining, we see it already for the last two to three years. People combining their personal trip with their business trip. It's called beleisure in the industry but it's actually one of our fastest growing kind of things which is I'm going to London or Paris for the week but I'm staying for the weekend and we support both. So you'll see us going much more into really big building the best travel agency on the planet and much less towards the ERP side. So can you pay for your phone bill through us or your marketing budget? The answer is yes. The functionality is there. It's not where an avant focus is and in fact Brex is a partner and there is a reason for that when it goes much more towards there while sending them to Brex.
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A
So if I were to fast forward five years and take a look at the composition of your revenue base, how much should I see coming from really purely defined enterprise revenue and how much would I see coming from more of a direct to consumer or leisure focused?
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I think it will still be very much B2B driven. I think if I'm taking a 20 years view and I kind of mentioned that we always look at Navan kind of as Amazon for travel. That's it was on our seed round deck. We talked about it like that and it's still there. Eventually we want to. We have the traveler and if it's travel we want them to think about Navana. Simple as that. But in five years I think, you know we started B2B. We are very strong in B2B. I think what is kind of making the line blurry is actually the employee, the traveler doesn't really think about it as I'm only doing my B2B trip. It actually started with execs. We noticed that execs are traveling a lot of times with their family and they want to. They would try to come and book it for five people but not like their coworkers but their family and they ask us where do we do that? And we said no. We are not supporting kids travel. And then we started to ask them, why do you need, like, to have, you know, do you have kids working for you? And they said, no, we need the CEO, the CFO family to join to the next trip. And that's how we started to say, oh, we actually need to support that combination of a business trip and a personal trip. And then we start to see that employees are doing it, that employees don't want to separate. And you don't want to check out from your hotel on Friday and really check yourself in, because this is paid by the company and this. This is paid by you. So we've put this entire functionality there that is basically supporting Belizer, which is. It's the same hotel booking, but this part is being paid by your employers. This part is being paid by you. But also your employer doesn't see that. The first part of the trip, the employer saw it, but then it gets to privacy. You don't want to see the private part of it. So I think you asked me about five years, and I would even say in 10 years. I think in 10 years, people will really want to meet. It will almost be a reaction to the opposite that you see that organizations are becoming more efficient, more cold. They're kind of. I really. I'm saying it all the time. In the era of AI, I think that in person, connections will be significantly more important. You kind of see it like with other kind of industry. The wellness is getting stronger and stronger. Spirituality is getting stronger and stronger. There is a reason for that. I think the reason is almost the opposite. And, you know, salespeople will continue to sell and meet. The entire organization will do that, and we want to be there for them.
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A
Could you talk about, just given your vantage point, Ariel, about what you may have seen this year in terms of certain destinations that have been well known for corporate travel, like Las Vegas, have actually struggled this year in 2026. Others are doing well. What sort of regional differences are you seeing, just given the amount of data that I'm sure you're looking at all the time?
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B
I think it's actually related to what I was saying. I. Lines are getting blurrier and blurrier between this is my corporate world and this is my kind of personal life. Right. So I went to this AI conference two weeks ago in Paris.
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A
Yeah.
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And it was completely like. It was all of the companies from the US showing up in Paris. So I was asking myself, so why is it in Paris?
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Because it's Paris.
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It's exactly. Exactly. Because it's Not Vegas, it's Paris.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And, and there are people that like Vegas. But if you kind of think about it, I want to really emphasize something else, something unique. The opening dinner was in Versailles, and I think it was one of the first kind of private events in Versailles. And I was sitting there and I was looking around me and I was saying, wow, there are all of these really AI companies that everybody are reading about them all day long. They're all sitting here in this conference, which is very, very face to face. Very much the opposite of AI agents. Right. And all of them are excited to be there. And this entire conference is very vibey. And last night of the conference, there was a party and we at Navan, we are really, really good at our parties. We love it. And I think, again, there is a reason for that. It's actually, if you believe in this, like you guys here in the office, people are here. It's very different than what you see in kind of older companies. So I think this is where things are going.
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A
Ariel Cohen, thank you for taking time to travel here to the New York studio. It's been such a pleasure. Come back. I want to know how it's going as the year goes on.
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B
Yeah, of course. I'd be happy to.
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A
Thank you.
- [28:17]
B
Thank you.
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A
Well, huge thanks, Rael Cohen, for joining us. That's it for today's Brew Markets daily, that refresh you've been putting off until the right deal came along. It's here. Wayfair's Black Friday in July sale is happening now, so you can finally get the style you've been waiting for. For less. Get up to 80% off area rugs and up to 60% off outdoor and bedroom furniture. Shop Wayfair's huge selection of styles and find the piece to fit your style, budget and space, plus free shipping. Black Friday in July ends July 27th. Shop today@wayfair.com Wayfair Every style, every home.