Navan, which is a travel management, expense management, and payments provider, filed to go public last week.  Between ChatGPT and the readily available S-1 teardowns (see here), you do not need a comprehensive review from me.  Instead, I will focus on the evolution of the company and how it makes money.

Navan’s Evolution

Navan began as a pure-play travel management company for corporations and still uses travel as its “lead/wedge” offering.  (It started with GDS content only, and then added NDC content from the suppliers directly.  NDC content is more flexible and rich XML-based content, as opposed to the older, static EDI-based content from the GDS world.  It also disintermediates the GDS.)  Navan then added expense management software and eventually Navan-issued cards.   The journey looks like this:

When it started in travel, Navan was competing with corporate travel agencies.  With expense management, it added Concur, Expensify, and others as competition.  Expanding into cards, it added American Express, Brex, and Ramp as competitors.  Having said that, Navan also partners with many of these players.  Take the payments space as an example.  Navan had a gross booking value (GBV) of $4.1 billion in the six months ended July 31, 2025.  Its payment volume during the same period was $2.0 billion, so half of the bookings were settled on Navan-issued cards.  The other half were settled with cards brought to the table by their customers.  These issuers include partners like American Express and Brex, who also compete with Navan.  Everyone is a frenemy in the colliding worlds of travel booking, expense management, and corporate cards!

The marketecture diagram for the Navan platform is depicted in the S-1 as follows:

How Navan Makes Money

Ninety percent of Navan’s revenue is from “usage-based”, or transactional, fees.  Each time a corporate traveler books a trip with Navan, the company receives revenue from several sources:

1. Navan charges travelers a booking fee per trip.  According to a web search, this fee is $25 per trip and provides access to live agent support 24/7.  Larger companies presumably buy blocks of trips and negotiate smaller per-trip fees.
2. Navan receives a commission for each booking from the airlines, hotels, or other travel providers.
3. If the trip is paid for using a Navan-issued card, Navan also shares in some of the interchange fees with its customers and bank partners.

Navan tells us their “usage yield” on transactions, or what you and I would call “take rate”, is about 7%.  It’s unclear how much of the 7% comes from each of the three sources above, but the commission figures to be the highest, followed perhaps by the booking fee, and finally the payment revenue.  The payment net take rate would be approximately 1%, but only on half of the GBV.

Ten percent of Navan’s revenue is subscription revenue generated from the sale of Navan’s expense management software, similar to Expensify or Concur.  Navan Expense seems to have a freemium model with up to five users free, and then a subscription starts at $15 per user per month.  Again, I presume large enterprises negotiate subscriptions with lower per-user per-month fees.

Summary

The functions of travel booking, expense management, and payments are all essential for completing a trip.  Many years ago, when Concur started, these were separate applications.  Concur bought a travel booking solution, and the merging of the applications began.  Now it is quite the horse race of consolidated purveyors leading with various parts of the value proposition and targeting different customer sizes from SMB to Mid-Market to Enterprises.  It really is a 3×3 matrix.

In the way I segment the world of B2B platforms, Navan is a matchmaker (or marketplace) that is now adding an application on the buyer side of the marketplace, as well as a payments mechanism.