Contrary to the trend of staying private, Navan's IPO was partly a go-to-market strategy. Large corporate customers demand the financial transparency and long-term stability that being a public company provides. This credibility was crucial for unlocking the enterprise segment and winning major accounts.
Ariel Cohen states his primary competitive threat isn't established giants or well-funded rivals. Instead, he worries about the undiscovered team that is "ignorant enough about the problem but are really, really, really good," as they are the most likely to introduce a truly disruptive new approach to the market.
Navan's CEO sees the debate over which LLM is best as unimportant because the infrastructure is becoming a commodity. The real value is created in the application layer. Navan's own agentic platform, Cognition, intelligently routes tasks to different models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) to get the best result for the job.
To demonstrate the power of AI in development, CEO Ariel Cohen tasked his co-founder with rebuilding their expense product over a weekend. Using AI tools, he accomplished the task in just six hours, signaling a dramatic shift in development cycles and the feasibility of rapidly rewriting complex applications.
Ariel Cohen is unequivocal about the personal cost of building his company: he deeply regrets not investing enough time in his children during the intense growth years. He frames this sacrifice as a price he paid for Navan's success, a debt he is now actively trying to repay by prioritizing family.
Ariel Cohen argues that the strongest competitive advantage is a product that employees love. He backs this with a powerful statistic: in Navan's history, only six enterprise customers have ever churned, and five of them later came back, highlighting retention driven by superior user experience rather than contracts.
Ariel Cohen acknowledges employee morale is 100% correlated with the stock price. He sees his role as a counter-force, continuously focusing the team on strong internal metrics and the 2-to-10-year journey, conditioning them to treat daily market fluctuations as irrelevant noise to the real business performance.
Navan's consumption-based model requires immediate investment in sales and commissions. The resulting high-margin revenue materializes over subsequent years. Public investors, focused on quarterly P&Ls, see the upfront cost but undervalue the highly efficient, low-churn growth algorithm that pays off over the long term.
For high-stakes operations like changing a flight, any AI hallucination is a catastrophic failure. This necessity for 100% accuracy in a complex vertical like travel forced Navan to build its own proprietary, agentic AI platform rather than relying on external models which could result in customer loss and lawsuits.