Navan has raised its performance expectations for its 2027 fiscal year following a strong first quarter with 40 per cent year-over-year revenue growth.
Navan's revenue for the quarter, which ended on 30 April, totalled $220 million, as gross booking volume increased 50 per cent year over year to surpass the $3 billion mark, the company reported.
In an earnings call on Wednesday (10 June), Navan executives said the growth reflected both a resilient business travel industry as well as the company's growth in the enterprise segment.
"Q1 was full of storms, a war, TSA problems and strikes, but we saw very strong momentum," Navan president Michael Sindicich said in an interview prior to the earnings call. "It just shows how resilient business travel is."
For enterprise segment growth, Navan reported such client wins as Allegiant, advertising company Criteo, elevator and mobility manufacturer Schindler and agribusiness company Simplot. The company said its client base now includes 45 of the companies currently in the S&P 500, an increase from 28 companies a year ago.
Navan aims to continue building in the segment and reported that its request for proposals for the first quarter were up 200 per cent compared with the first quarter of the prior fiscal year. Sindicich said the company's win rates also have increased year over year.
Ariel Cohen, Navan's co-founder and CEO, said the company's AI focus is driving some of that growth.
"Every company right now, every serious company in the world, is having an AI initiative, driven from the top," Cohen said. "This means that Navan is one of the only AI vendors that is leading on an enterprise scale in the market."
The company also reported that its payment volume in the first quarter increased 29 per cent year over year to $1.3 billion. Last year in the first quarter, year-over-year growth was about 11 per cent, Sindicich said. Navan's initial public offering has enabled that acceleration, he added.
"We were scaling payments very quickly, but we weren't in a position financially to be able to fund that growth, so we stopped selling it that much," Sindicich said. "With access to more capital and a restructured balance sheet… we are in a position to accelerate our sales of travel payments and payments in general."
Cohen said that Navan during the first quarter already migrated some Reed & Mackay clients to its platform as it rolls Reed & Mackay into a "unified Navan brand." The full migration process will occur over the next couple of years, he said.
Following its first quarter performance, Navan now projects its total revenue for the 2027 fiscal year, which runs through to 31 January, will increase about 30 per cent year over year, to the range of $907 million to $913 million, and the company expects business travel to remain resilient during that period. Prior expectations were for an increase of about 24 per cent.
"Demand is very high," Navan CFO Aurélien Nolf said. "People are leveraging business travel to generate revenue for their own business. We believe this trend is going to continue for the remainder of the year."
Navan reported a net loss of $21 million for the first quarter, an improvement from a $61 million loss in the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year.