Big Interview: Navan on 'proving technology delivers better service’

CFO says tech delivers better service

Question: Navan has been around for more than 10 years. Does the company still position itself as a tech player tackling inertia in business travel?

Aurélien Nolf, chief financial officer at Navan: As CFO, I have a great many interactions with clients, investors and large financial institutions, all of whom use competitors’ solutions created 30 or 40 years ago. The feedback is unanimous: the experience is awful. Everything is fragmented, there is no accounting reconciliation and no one is there to help when something goes wrong. Navan set out to solve that by making the user experience smooth through technology. From the outset, when we were founded 10 years ago, our stance was to base everything on direct connections with airlines and hotel chains.

Over the past two years, we have seen an explosion in capabilities thanks to new technologies. I have been at Navan for five months and AI-based autonomous agents are already replacing systems that were in place when I arrived. We really are a step ahead.

Question: How do you explain this inertia in business travel compared with other sectors that are moving faster?

There is a huge technological foundation from the 1980s with the GDSs (Amadeus, Sabre) underpinning the industry with outdated technology. The system is so complex that evolving it takes years and requires billions of euros in investment that many do not have the capacity or the appetite to make.

Question: Does integration with third‑party tools via Navan Anywhere address this inertia?

We have just launched it and we will measure behaviours very precisely, but it’s clear the business traveller does not want to go to a platform or use a new tool; they want efficiency. There are tools like Slack or Google Gemini. People now want to find everything in one place — for it to be convenient, fast and smooth. That is what we want to unlock: the ability to book a trip anywhere. The first step is Google. But of course there will be the ability to do it on many other tools very soon. Slack, for example, is an ecosystem that connects a huge number of applications to get a lot done. Users now ask: where is Navan? Today, we can notify you of your flight tickets in Slack, but not book yet. That is the future.

I think artificial intelligence will bring, in five to ten years, its biggest revolution: the absence of an interface. Users will want to be able to do everything at any time, in any place, without the barrier of a password and without having to remember which platform to use for which task. They will want to do everything anywhere.

Question: Doesn’t this integration create a dependency on those platforms, or even weaken the Navan brand?

It is actually the opposite. We have built a travel infrastructure (global licences, direct connections) over the past 10 years. Even Google has given up on the idea of booking directly on its site. This infrastructure is our protection. In future, it will be Google that wants to use ours.

What is more, the Navan brand is gaining ground because we have become unavoidable. Everyone in the industry knows us now. We are more active in marketing and, in time, we will offer exclusive benefits (lounges, airline perks) for Navan customers.

Question: Today Navan is a recognised brand, listed on Nasdaq and showing a 50% increase in booking volume. How do you explain that?

It is mainly down to new clients. We have signed very large enterprise contracts (more than 1,000 employees) with companies such as Visa, Criteo or Unilever. At the same time, our long-standing clients like Anthropic or OpenAI are also seeing their business boom on our platform.

A year ago we were a company seen as too small and some thought it was a risk to work with Navan. Today that is no longer the case. We are able to communicate about these large companies that work with us. We now have huge accounts such as Visa, Netflix, Kiabi, Opella or Unilever working with us in more than 50 countries; tens of thousands of employees use our solution, with satisfaction scores that are extremely high. And that, I think, is the surprise. The surprise we are creating is that people assumed that because we were technology, the service would be poorer. In fact, we are proving the opposite: technology delivers better service.

Question: et revenue is rising “only” 40%. Why the difference?

The bigger the company, the more it has direct contracts with suppliers. On those bookings, Navan does not receive a commission but charges a service fee. We are very comfortable with that because our current strategy is to win market share on booking volume. We are in a very assertive sales mode to penetrate the market.

Navan is a company that benefits from volume. We have built this complete platform with all its features, and this platform costs the same whether you have one client or 100 clients. We have invested an enormous amount of money and, today, we want as many users as possible to benefit from it. We will continue to innovate, but attracting new clients is very much the priority.

Question: Navan’s share price is now above its IPO price (1), but that has not always been the case…

When I arrived, there was a complete disconnect between the share price and the value of the company. That was due to a combination of factors: strikes in the United States, a government shutdown and the beginning of what was called the “SaaS apocalypse”. Everyone panicked. I spent my first five months educating investors to explain our numbers and our potential. Today, we are back at a level that makes more sense, even though we still have enormous potential.

Question: Does being listed change the way you innovate or experiment?

Technology allows you to create, test and adjust a product extremely quickly. For example, our AI-powered assistant, Navan Edge, was launched very rapidly. Despite the listing, we are keeping that test-and-innovation DNA. From now on, users will expect a great deal of innovation and new features, so we will have to respond very quickly. It is an existential question: if you do not move, you die.

(1) At the time of the interview, on 9 July 2026, the share — priced at $25 at IPO — had just closed at $25.63 on Nasdaq.