Navan is a California-based all-in-one solution for travel and expense management. Launched in 2015, Navan most recently raised a $154M Series G in October 2022, with funding from Andreessen Horowitz, PremjiInvest, and Group 11. Navan was previously known as TripActions, but completed a rebrand in February 2023.

In an interview with The Financial Revolutionist, EVP and GM Michael Sindicich describes Navan’s broadened focus on expense (not just travel), outlines the staffing decisions and strategies the company undertook during the pandemic, and explains why the company rebranded at this stage in its journey.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Financial Revolutionist: I'd love to hear how you describe what you guys are doing now—it's obviously expanded quite a bit.

Michael Sindicich: We started in the early days as a corporate travel solution, and we approached it a bit differently than the industry normally does. We said, Hey, booking tools are not very user friendly. We thought we could do it much better if we were the travel agency ourselves—doing support and connecting with all the booking tools. 

With a really intense lens on delivering for the end user, which is the traveler, you get adoption on the platform, and therefore the CFO is happy, because they're now managing travel, they're applying policy, all these things. If you look at legacy tools, almost 50% of the employees actually don't use them anyway: They go book outside because the tool doesn't work or they found cheaper prices elsewhere. 

And as we were doing that core work, we started expanding into larger and larger customers. And what we saw was that payments were a huge pain point as it related to corporate travel. Companies would put a ghost card on file, and then users would use that payment method to book. But then what happens is at the end of the month, the finance team needs to reconcile the bookings with all the transactions on the credit card, but that game of match is really hard.

Looking at the fintech players out there, we now use Stripe to generate a new virtual card for every new booking—a 16-digit number and it perfectly reconciles in real time. So we came out with that. And then we said, Well, you know, when travelers are on the road, they need a way to pay. And since we know the context of the trip, we can actually issue them physical cards and apply company policy on the card.

When did you launch that latter product?

We launched that on February 25 of 2020—a week before the global pandemic hit, and all travel went to zero. In fact, our revenue went to zero, if not negative, because everyone was canceling. So we said, Well, okay, travel is kind of dead for the time being, but we do think it's coming back. We actually used the opportunity to go and sell to really large enterprises, since the best time to change your corporate travel system is when nobody's traveling. We won Netflix, Qualcomm, Thomson Reuters, Unilever, and others. All of our travel competitors were just dormant.

The other piece is that we have the card, and we know how to underwrite and give credit to companies. Since we had value there, we built end-to-end spend management, because everyone’s distributed now, so people need to travel but also do spend for work-from-home and other things, as a full-on corporate card. So now we're going to market with a whole T&E solution.

What were the conversations like internally to decide to put resources into growth rather than just furloughing workers?

We had a meeting with our entire executive staff in the office trying to figure out how we navigate this thing. We said, Should we do what everyone else is doing and basically take a backseat and shutter the company and wait for this thing to pass, or should we do what we know best—and go on the offense and actually take an opportunity to take a bet?

We really never lost the hope and the dream of being able to solve this for our customers. We actually put quite a lot of resources and money into going and building up the enterprise sales team and continuing to sell travel, but then also really shifting some of our best resources internally to double down on expense. It was also a way to diversify from specifically just travel when there's a pandemic. It was certainly a bet and a gamble, especially in the early days, but we very quickly started to get pretty strong product market fit and we're selling very well.

I imagine the travel agency staff was either reassigned or furloughed— 

Yeah. 

What about support folks? I imagine a lot of them could be reassigned to integration support and helping these massive companies that were being brought on board. 

When the pandemic first hit, we very quickly made some decisions around cutting some of the support team, reducing the field marketing folks, the recruiting team, and others. And I remember we got a lot of flack from it because we did layoffs over Zoom—but it’s a global pandemic, so I’m not sure what they wanted us to do. It was tough, but we made the right cuts to still have a productive company—and we invested in other areas, like engineering to build expense management, enterprise sales, and other specific bets that we were taking as a company. 

The other thing that we did is become really efficient. Gross margins, unit economics, and all the stuff that you hear companies talking about today—we were already there when the pandemic hit. One of our biggest enhancements has been leveraging AI to help travelers get the support they need. So we built a chat bot called Eva—and this was before ChatGPT came out—that lets you change flights, offer insights into trips, and other solutions. 

Has that solution changed since ChatGPT’s launch?

We’re actually fully integrated into ChatGPT. I need to be on a trip here for work, and, by the way, I want to stay the weekend on my personal card: Can you book this for me? It can really handle complex stuff for you. That DNA around efficiency in the early days of the pandemic is what's helping us scale now; we entered the pandemic at a $4 billion private valuation, and now we're currently at $9.2 billion. 

Last question: You were previously known as TripActions. Why the rebrand? 

We’re going down market, being lighter, being more fun, more accessible. That's what the rebrand is. Everyone knew TripActions—why do you rebrand when you’re worth $9 billion? It's kind of late, but for us, it's very early in the journey, and we have a long way to go. 

Navan stands for navigate—T&E, booking trips—and avant garde—free, fun. I think the rebrand has gone swimmingly, and it also helps broaden what we're doing, because TripActions was really associated with corporate travel. We're all excited about it.