Long Lake Management has completed its $6.3 billion acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel, taking the travel management company private and paving the way for "heavy" investment in AI deployment across Amex GBT, the companies announced.
The acquisition, first announced in May and approved by Amex GBT shareholders on 3 August brought shareholders $9.50 per share, more than a 65 per cent premium over its volume-weighted average price in the 30 days following the merger agreement.
Amex GBT shares now have ceased trading and are delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
Amex GBT is the latest – the 35th, to be exact – in a long line of acquisitions for Long Lake, a permanent-capital holding company that focuses on transforming its acquisitions with applied AI, but the Amex GBT deal is its largest to date and "the world's first AI take-private deal," according to Amex GBT.
In a post on LinkedIn, Long Lake co-founder and CEO Alex Taubman said the focus now is "preparing Amex GBT's technology platform for the agentic travel management era."
At the heart of that transformation is Long Lake's Nexus, a self-learning AI platform that maps workflows and cleans up data for integration. Amex GBT said it performs as much as five times better over AI models built for general purposes.
"Long Lake acquires generational companies and holds them for the long term," according to Taubman. "Our engineers embed with the team to deploy Nexus, our AI platform for knowledge work. Across our portfolio, the average employee using Nexus saves 8.3 hours per week."
Taubman also noted that Long Lake is currently in hiring mode for researchers and engineers in New York and San Francisco.
For Amex GBT customers, the TMC said that account teams, contracts and service will "carry on without interruption" following the acquisition as the AI investment and integration occurs "behind the scenes," according to the TMC.
"From agentic customer tools to Al-empowered travel counsellors, our customers can expect continuous innovation that will make the service they already trust faster, smarter and more personalised," Amex GBT CEO Paul Abbott said in a statement.
Long Lake said the acquisition was financed by a combination of its existing investors along with Koch's investment and acquisition arm Koch Equity Development. Investors for Long Lake, which was founded in 2023, include General Catalyst, Alpha Wave, Elad Gil, D1 and Thrive.