For Friday, July 24th, it's BrewMarkets Daily, and I'm Anne Berry. 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 BrewMarkets. Well, we talk a lot about travel stocks here, but I was particularly delighted to have the chance to sit down with Ariel Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of one travel industry company I frankly hadn't paid much attention to before. That's Navan, 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, Navan 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 over 60% year-to-date this year. Now, that is despite the SaaS apocalypse that's impacted other software names. Meaning, Navan's 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 Navan's 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 like rabidly enthusiastic traveler.
And Navan is possibly the one travel company I've heard about the least. And I cover this all day. So, I'm really excited to dig in here. I think I may remember you more as TripActions. We'll talk about the 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.
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 that 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.
So, let's talk about what that means in terms of product. You founded in 2015.
Name then was TripActions.
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 phone right now, describe what it would look like for say
Super, super easy to use. It is probably, you mentioned that you cover travel as well. It's probably the best product out there to plan, to book your trip, to support yourself when while you're on the go, and then when you're coming back, to just everything is easy. I'm talking about expense management.
So, you come to the product, the product knows you, kind of knows in advance what you are likely to book.
And what your employer's budget is, right? Or your travel. That's because this is, so folks understand, this is an employer-led product, and employees are using. 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, CSAT. 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 7 minutes to book an entire business trip, which tends to be complex. When you want to change it, you're actually chatting with our 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 the expense management is completely automated. You're 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 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're willing to book below the company's budget, what the company was telling you to do, we're actually rewarding you
personal trips. So, you can later book your personal trip through us using this reward. So, that's how we save money.
We're going to come back to that 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?
So, we are actually supporting everybody from SMBs. We 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 to using it. But we 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 big company.
And talk to me about who it is that your sales force is selling to. That's what, how big is your sales force? Because a lot of, when we take a step back, a lot of SaaS companies, software as a service business, have been really trying to figure out where to spend their money. And building out their sales force has been a sort of surprising area in which that they've doubled down despite productivity gains with AI. How many sales people do you have? And who in an organization are they selling to directly?
Yeah, first of all, I think that we have one, we're 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 person that will care about the travel budget is actually the CFO. It is a pretty big part of the P&L and especially the opex. So, it's distinct that you know CFOs will come and let's say 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're basically preventing your business from growing. You know, the people that are usually traveling are the sales people, are your execs, are your business development people. This is how you do an M&A. This is how you are hiring the next exec. So, CFOs care 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 travelers' experience. So, we emphasize that your sales team will be way more effective. And your employees will stop complaining about how hard it is to expense or how hard it is to book travel.
