Navan CEO and co-founder Ariel Cohen on the ChatGPT moment that forced him to reinvent a company processing $10B+ in ...
What Ariel Cohen said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Ariel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Navan, discussed the company's mission to empower in-person connections through AI-driven travel and expense management. He highlighted that Navan, which started in 2015 and went to market in 2017, now has over 12,000 customers and processes more than $10 billion in bookings annually, with last quarter's revenue growing by 40%. Cohen introduced Navan Edge, a flagship AI agentic platform that personalizes trip booking, and Navan Anywhere, which extends this to platforms like Google Gemini for Work. He argued that AI's value ultimately lies in the application layer, citing ChatGPT as a prime example, and emphasized the importance of vision, mission, and values for startup resilience, referencing how he stuck to Navan's core belief during COVID despite travel's downturn.
Key takeaways
Navan processes over $10 billion in bookings annually and grew last quarter's revenue by 40%.
Navan Edge is an AI agentic platform that personalizes business travel booking with a loyalty wallet.
Navan Anywhere extends Navan's services to platforms like Google Gemini for Work.
Cohen believes AI's real value will return to the application layer, not just infrastructure.
3:22Could you just speak to that and maybe your motivation for starting the company in the first place?
5:00How do you and Navan think about where you're building?
6:14What did you mean by that and what did you see?
7:25... your experience building the business from scratch from 2015 for the other founders and builders that might be listening to this, and you could leave one Post-it note with advice based on your experience, what would that Post-it note say?
Startup will have so many ups and downs. You'll come to so many things that will get you very close to shut down the business. And the only thing that will keep the company is if you know the vision, the mission, your values, and if you know how to communicate it to your employees, your customers, your investors, all of the audience around you.
Welcome back guys to Founders and Builders. We are live at the RAISE Summit here in Paris with none other than Ariel Cohen, the CEO and co-founder of Navan. Thank you for joining us, Ariel.
Awesome. So, for the next 15 minutes, we're going to jump into some of the most interesting topics around Navan's business model and how they're using AI. But for those that haven't heard of the company, you guys went public at the end of 2025.
Yeah, we are actually thinking about ourselves as doing this: bringing people together, making sure that business travel, expense management, payments, it's all easy, automated. You come to Navan, you book your entire business trip in less than seven minutes. You get rewarded when you book under policy. So, we are encouraging you to save the company money, expense by swiping a credit card, and everything is automated and done. So, that's what we do.
Went to market in 2017 and grew amazingly since then. We are now having more than 12,000 customers. We are processing bookings of more than $10 billion a year, grew our last quarter revenue by 40%. So yeah, yeah.
So it actually starts with a different product, Navan Edge. Navan Edge is our flagship AI product. So Navan today is an agentic platform. Everything that you do, whether you push on a button or you do something else, it's actually employing an agent—an agent to book your flight, to change your flight, to expense, whatever. But we brought it all together to Navan Edge.
Navan Edge, you get inside as a user. Everybody here can sign up for this. You don't even need to work for a company. And then you start to just chat with it. It's your personal assistant. It knows everything about you. It automatically creates your loyalty wallet, so it knows what is your statuses and everything. And then you book your entire trip: flights, hotels, cars, restaurants, events, everything about their trip. And it's getting more and more and more personalized.
When we saw that, we were asking ourselves, why limiting it to our UI? Let's bring it to everybody's UI. So it could be corporate UI like Slack. We launched it inside Google Gemini for Work. So if you are an enterprise customer of Google and a customer of Navan, you can actually book stuff from Gemini. And we're going to continue to add it to many more platforms. So it's what we see in Navan Edge that is so, so powerful on our app delivered on everybody's apps, basically.
Before we started recording, Ariel, you mentioned that one of the key reasons you're so excited about Navan is this bringing it back to the in-person focus.
Cohen, A. (2026, September 10). Ariel Cohen (CEO, Navan): Building the world's first AI Travel Company [Interview transcript]. Founders and Builders. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1331885/
MLA
Ariel Cohen. "Ariel Cohen (CEO, Navan): Building the world's first AI Travel Company." Founders and Builders, 10 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1331885/.
BibTeX
@misc{cohen2026_1331885,
author = {Ariel Cohen},
title = {Ariel Cohen (CEO, Navan): Building the world's first AI Travel Company},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Founders and Builders. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1331885/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
