Navan IPO to Test Investor Appetite for B2B FinTech Platforms

By any measure, 2025 is shaping up to be “Hot Tech Summer.”

Particularly for FinTechs, where Circle and Chime have notched heady gains in a short period of time.

With the recent news that Navan has filed initial paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to go public, investor focus may move beyond digital banks and stablecoins to take a look at another corner of FinTech, where B2B platforms modernize back-office functions.

Details of the offering are scant so far. Navan’s June 20 disclosure simply stated that the firm confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the SEC.

“The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined,” Navan said in last week’s announcement. 

More details will be present when the S-1 comes in. But in delving through the company’s site, as far back as the fall of 2022, in a series G funding round, the company had been valued at $9.2 billion. The firm had said at the time that its card-led automated expense management platform, Navan Expense, records more than 7.5x spend volume growth in Q2 FY23. In recent years, the company has supported card linking from more than 100 banks.

Through Navan Connect, as detailed here, corporate clients link their eligible Visa, Mastercard or American Express corporate cards to categorize and track — and set guardrails around — categories of card spend including travel and entertainment.

Payments are reconciled in the back office, the firm has said, through real-time data matching. Employee reimbursements are effected through uploading photos of receipts to the Navan app. Reimbursement comes through payroll or funds sent to employee bank accounts.

Navan Corporate Cards, per company materials, include virtual cards, with limits for subscriptions or one-time purchases.

Navan has tested the IPO waters before. As reported by CNBC a bit more than a year ago, the FinTech was reportedly “not far” from an IPO, in the words of CEO Ariel Cohen. The CEO said the firm was on a course to achieve profitability in 2024 and become cash flow positive, with sales growth of 40% and the FinTech business growing at 100% vs. the travel-focused business growth rate of about 30%.

As reported last year, Brex and Navan launched a new joint offering for enterprises that streamlines travel payments into one workflow when using the Navan travel management system. BrexPay for Navan, the companies said in the October announcement, integrated business travel and payments solution by bringing together Navan’s travel services and Brex’s global corporate cards, the companies said.

To be sure, the market volatility and valuation cuts that have been a hallmark of the FinTech realm over the past several months may have injected a note of caution into Navan’s proceedings towards public listings.  

But a move now would come against a backdrop where, as PYMNTS Intelligence has found in the second edition of the “Growth Corporates Working Capital Index” done in collaboration between Visa, virtual cards are being used more often to pay for and manage expenses. Use of these cards had grown by nearly a third, year over year, as measured in 2024.

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