Navan IPOs on Nasdaq: CTO Ilan Twig celebrates with 17 family members and a glass of champagne
Oct 30, 2025 with Ilan Twig
Key Points
- Navan IPOs on Nasdaq on October 30, 2025, after nearly collapsing during COVID when usage-based revenue dropped from $100 million to zero in six weeks.
- Co-founder Ilan Twig spent $30,000 on a GPU to study uncensored LLMs, leading to Navan Cognition framework that powers Ava, an AI travel agent resolving over 50% of support interactions unsupervised.
- Ava handles real-time travel disruptions like flight changes and cancellations autonomously while matching human agent satisfaction scores across thousands of daily chats.
Summary
Navan listed on the Nasdaq on October 30, 2025, with co-founder and CTO Ilan Twig marking the occasion live from the exchange floor with a glass of champagne and 17 family members in attendance, including his father, who turns 90 in two weeks.
Navan, which Twig co-founded with Ariel Cohen more than a decade ago, is a corporate travel and expense management platform. Its original business model was purely usage-based, with no monthly fees or enterprise contracts, a deliberate design choice to keep product quality central. That model nearly proved fatal when COVID hit, cutting revenue from roughly $100 million to zero in six weeks as business travel collapsed.
Twig says the company emerged with a materially more diversified and resilient revenue model. He describes the rebuilt business as "pandemic proof" in the sense that a repeat scenario would cause a decline but not a complete revenue wipeout.
On the AI side, Twig personally spent approximately $30,000 on a GPU after ChatGPT launched to run uncensored LLMs locally and study their behavior before deploying anything to production. That research led to an internal framework Navan calls Navan Cognition, developed with a Columbia University professor, which structures LLMs into what Twig describes as a "highly functioning cognitive system."
The first production output is Ava, Navan's AI virtual travel agent. Ava handles booking requests and real-time disruptions, including flight changes, cancellations, and refund negotiations, entirely unsupervised. It currently manages thousands of chats daily, resolves rather than deflects more than 50% of incoming support interactions, and achieves customer satisfaction scores that match human agent levels.
Navan was previously known as TripActions before rebranding. The company's core thesis on corporate travel is using AI to eliminate the friction of getting to a destination so employees can focus on being present once there.