Navan Raises $923 Million in Travel Management Platform IPO

Business travel and expense management software company Navan raised $923 million upon going public.

The company’s shares opened at $22 each Thursday (Oct. 30), below an initial public offering (IPO) of $25, per a Bloomberg News report, which listed Navan’s market value at $5.5 billion.

The company’s listing comes amid a government shutdown, which has caused the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to furlough workers and put its reviews of listings on hold.

The commissioner later said that because regulators were not able to go over registration statements, the SEC would not seek to penalize companies that left out pricing information from prospectuses filed during the shutdown and then listed either during or after the shutdown.

In an interview with CNBC last week, SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the shutdown had not completely curtailed the commission’s market regulation efforts.

“Even during the shutdown, as we conduct our surveillance on the marketplace, we have stopped trading on eight foreign companies on Nasdaq that showed indicia of manipulative behavior — ramp and dump, we call it,” Atkins said.

Still, a separate report by Reuters Thursday noted that the shutdown had stalled the IPO market just as it was gaining steam after a prolonged lull.

“The IPO market has been a bit wobbly over the past month or so; we’ve definitely lost some momentum since the start of the quarter,” Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, a provider of IPO-focused research and ETFs, told Reuters.

“Some of that is due to the shutdown, global trade tensions, and the hotter AI IPOs cooling off. Still, recent IPOs have mostly held up.”

Navan announced its plans to go public late last month, coming after a summer that featured several high-profile IPOs.

Navan co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ilan Twig about the company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual travel agent Ava.

“Our goal is to set a new standard for business-ready AI,” Twig told PYMNTS, noting that AI isn’t simply an AI chatbot, but also an agent.

“Ava actually takes action, whether that’s canceling or changing a flight, issuing refunds, booking seats or upgrading classes,” Twig said. “Ava can even understand when a user gets frustrated and transfers the chat automatically to a human travel agent even if Ava could handle the interaction by itself.”

For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.