Pandemic Darlings The pandemic economy, in original documents
Home Profiles TripActions / Navan Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Profiles · Companies and entities

ProfileCompany or group

TripActions / Navan Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

Other company

Type
Company or group
Role
Other company
Updated

The profile

TripActions, a Palo Alto business-travel booking company now called Navan, earned a fee each time a client's employee booked a trip. In March 2020 its clients stopped traveling, and revenue fell by nearly 100 percent, Business Travel News reported from an interview with chief executive Ariel Cohen. The company laid off 296 people, 25 of whom were offered other jobs inside the company. A month earlier it had arranged up to $500 million in debt financing to launch a corporate payment card.

  • Category: travel and hospitality
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
  • Last updated: 2026-09-26

Founders, executives and investors

Cohen and Ilan Twig founded the company in 2015, and Cohen remained chief executive through the October 2025 IPO. Crunchbase counted about $480 million of equity funding by early 2020, including a $250 million Series D in June 2019 from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Group 11, Lightspeed and Zeev Ventures, TechCrunch reported.

Business before the pandemic

"We sign corporate accounts, and we have their users using us booking trips and we have a booking fee per trip," Cohen told PhocusWire. "So we make money when someone is using us." By early 2020 TripActions had nearly 4,000 corporate clients and more than 1,000 employees. It had planned to double its workforce that year and was aiming for revenue growth of four and a half times, Cohen said. In February 2020 it launched TripActions Liquid, a corporate payment card.

What the pandemic changed

TripActions first modeled a 50 percent drop in revenue, then 70 percent, and at 70 percent thought pay cuts and other internal measures would be enough. "Obviously this situation really required me to rethink our entire plan, because we make money on usage," Cohen said. "We were seeing no usage, and therefore no revenue."

U.S. employees were given notice on March 24, 2020, according to TechCrunch. The Wall Street Journal put the cut at a fifth to a quarter of the staff, TechCrunch reported; a TripActions spokesman said fewer than 300 people were affected. Recruiters, marketers and travel support agents were hit hardest. The spokesman said U.S. employees got at least three weeks' salary and two months of company-paid COBRA health coverage. Cohen said the company would put its money into product development for travel after the pandemic, and that TripActions was signing new corporate customers even with no bookings coming in.

After the first shock

The company moved further into corporate cards and expense management and renamed itself Navan. By 2025 its customers included Unilever, Adobe, Christie's, Blue Origin and Geico, CNBC reported.

Since 2025

Navan filed to go public on September 19, 2025, planning to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market as NAVN. Its registration statement reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million, up 32 percent, more than 10,000 customers and $7.6 billion of gross bookings, up 34 percent, CNBC reported. The company was still losing money.

The offering closed on October 31, 2025. Navan sold 30,000,000 new Class A shares at $25 each, for $713.3 million after underwriting discounts; selling stockholders sold another 6,924,406 shares, and Navan received nothing from those. The shares trade on Nasdaq as NAVN.

Sources

Back to top