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I-P-Go! Shares of Navan, a travel-tech firm based in Silicon Valley, hit the exchanges on Thursday. The company priced its initial public offering at $25 per share, raising roughly $923 million. The $25 per-share price is within the $24$26 range the company zeroed-in on last week, when it also announced it would sell nearly 37 million shares of common stock. The IPO puts Navans valuation at around $9.2 billion. Navan shares will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker NAVN. Founded in 2015, the company bills itself as an all-in-one business travel, payments, and expense management platform that makes travel easy for frequent travelers, helping customers find flights and hotels, automating expensing, and delivering an intuitive experience travelers love and finance teams rely on. In other words, the company utilizes AI technology to simplify corporate and business travel, aimed at reshaping an industry that has not changed in 30 years, per its SEC filings. Navan is attempting to fly as post-pandemic travel rebounds in a big way. Data from the Global Business Travel Association shows that worldwide business travel spending was expected to reach a record $1.57 trillion by the end of 2025, although that estimate may be blunted by the government shutdown and other factors. Notably, Navan is perhaps the most high-profile IPO over the past month, since the federal government shut down. The SECs filing process has been significantly stalled as the regulator has furloughed 90% of its staff. That put a damper on the overall IPO market, which had rebounded this year: During the third quarter of 2025, EY reports that 65 IPOs raised $15.7 billion, a big increase from the 40 IPOs that raised $8.6 billion during Q3 2024. All told, there have been 176 IPOs year-to-date totaling more than $30 billion, a 20% increase over 2024. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, in a statement on X, noted that MapLight Therapeutics, a relatively small biotech firm, went public earlier this week, and that it was proof that the governments regulatory machinery was still working. With yesterdays listing of MapLight, the IPO market is still open for businesscompanies are going public during the government shutdown using the method Congress originally intended, he wrote.
Category:
E-Commerce
House flippers are about to get an AI assist on their next renovation project. Kai is an AI-powered tool that can visually identify what’s needed to fix up a house and put it on the market. The system converts photos and videos of house projects into SKU-level material specifications and cost estimates, making it fast and easy for an institutional home renovator to create an actionable renovation plan and order all the materials needed to get the job done. Kai has just launched a partnership with home improvement retailer Home Depot to link its building material and product selection tools directly with Home Depot’s 3.5 million item inventory list. Home renovators will be able to use Kai to scan a project, identify the materials needed, and immediately order them from Home Depot. [Image: Kai] Kai’s cofounder and CEO Or Agassi calls it an “AI-native renovation intelligence platform” that can effectively reverse engineer a scope of work on anything from a kitchen remodel to a down-to-the-studs gut renovation. With a guided photography process, Kai analyzes images of a house to determine what materials are needed to complete a given project. A photo showing a cracked door, for example, would lead the tool to offer up a few options for replacement, with their prices and availability at Home Depot stores in the area. An image of an old furnace can lead the tool to recommend a more efficient model that can increase the resale value of the home. [Image: Kai] It’s an evolution of RenoWalk, an in-house tool Home Depot had used for more than a decade, which allowed business customers to streamline property management and renovation projects by integrating with Home Depot’s inventory and ordering systems. The company decided to sunset that tool, and now Kai is taking its place, using data from the tens of thousands of renovation projects completed using the old system. Kai declined to disclose terms of the Home Depot deal. Kai’s first users are large institutional housing investors and operators, including both public and private companies. Citing nondisclosure agreements, Kai declined to reveal the names of these companies. Some of these companies own more than 100,000 houses across the U.S. They also bring their own wealth of renovation data, which Kai uses to train client-specific AI models. “If you send us a scope of work of how you like to renovate, we will know how to create a playbook based on that,” Agassi says. The system also adjusts for different types of renovation projects and budget levels. “Whether you’re looking to optimize for selling to the market, selling off market, renting the property out, we know how to understand the renovation condition and tell you what needed to be done to hit this target renovation,” Agassi says. [Image: Kai] Agassi says the system has the potential to drastically reduce project timelines and budgets, and help get more affordable housing on the market. “There’s a shortage of five million single family rentals out there. And it’s only getting worse because new inventory is unable to catch up,” Agassia says. “We are trying to solve for the biggest issue in housing.” Agassi has been looking at the housing challenges in the U.S. for more than a decade. Previously he and Kai cofounder Tov Arneson created Stoa, a now-closed proptech company that helped connect fix-and-flip housing investors with institutional investors and housing operators looking for more inventory. The company was seeing solid growth since its launch in 2017 but a hike in interest rates in 2023 hit the company hard and it shut down. Agassi says that even though the company failed, the idea behind Stoa stuck with him. Kai is an evolution of that concept. “We are fulfilling what used to be our dream at Stoa, which is a system that you get into a property, take some photos, and it tells you what you need to do in order to do an optimized renovation,” says Agassi. “The technology was never there, and now it is.” Agassi says Kai expects to be serving tens of thousands of customers by the end of the year, and plans on expanding the tool for use by mom-and-pop landlords, DIYers, and contractors next year. “We start with the largest operators, but the goal is to go all the way down to the consumer sitting in the comfort of their own homes, taking some photos, and we tell them exactly what’s needed to be done in order to renovate for the optimal outcome,” Agassi says.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump’s meeting Thursday with China’s top leader Xi Jinping produced a raft of decisions to help dial back trade tensions, but no agreement on TikTok’s ownership.“China will work with the U.S. to properly resolve issues related to TikTok,” China’s Commerce Ministry said after the meeting.It gave no details on any progress toward ending uncertainty about the fate of the popular video-sharing platform in the U.S.The Trump administration had been signaling that it may have finally reached a deal with Beijing to keep TikTok running in the U.S.Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the two leaders will “consummate that transaction on Thursday in Korea.”Wide bipartisan majorities in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. if it did not find a new owner to replace China’s ByteDance. The platform went dark briefly on a January deadline but on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order to keep it running while his administration tries to reach an agreement for the sale of the company.Three more executive orders followed, as Trump, without a clear legal basis, extended deadlines for a TikTok deal. The second was in April, when White House officials believed they were nearing a deal to spin off TikTok into a new company with U.S. ownership. That fell apart when China backed out after Trump announced sharply higher tariffs on Chinese products. Deadlines in June and September passed, with Trump saying he would allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States in a way that meets national security concerns.Trump’s order was meant to enable an American-led group of investors to buy the app from China’s ByteDance, though the deal also requires China’s approval.However, TikTok deal is “not really a big thing for Xi Jinping,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific program, during a media briefing Tuesday. “(China is) happy to let (Trump) declare that they have finally kept a deal. Whether or not that deal will protect the data of Americans is a big question going forward.”“A big question mark for the United States, of course, is whether this is consistent with U.S. law since there was a law passed by Congress,” Glaser said.About 43% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, higher than any other social media app, including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published in September.A recent Pew Research Center survey found that about one-third of Americans said they supported a TikTok ban, down from 50% in March 2023. Roughly one-third said they would oppose a ban, and a similar percentage said they weren’t sure.Among those who said they supported banning the social media platform, about 8 in 10 cited concerns over users’ data security being at risk as a major factor in their decision, according to the report.The security debate centers on the TikTok recommendation algorithm which has steered millions of users into an endless stream of video shorts. China has said the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But a U.S. regulation that Congress passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok would require the platform to cut ties with ByteDance.American officials have warned the algorithm a complex system of rules and calculations that platforms use to deliver personalized content is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, but no evidence has been presented by U.S. officials proving that China has attempted to do so. Associated Press Writer Fu Ting contributed to this story from Washington. Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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