Navan (NASDAQ:NAVN) released first-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below.

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Summary

Navan Inc. reported a strong first quarter for fiscal 2027 with gross bookings reaching $3.1 billion, a 50% increase year over year, and revenue of $220 million, up 40% year over year.

The company is accelerating its go-to-market strategy, particularly in its sales-led and product-led growth motions, while leveraging its strong balance sheet to boost its travel payment business.

Navan is focusing on AI integration, enhancing its platform with AI-driven innovations, which is expected to improve customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Management highlighted the successful transition of customers from acquired platforms and the benefits of their AI model, which is more cost-effective and efficient.

For fiscal 2027, Navan raised its revenue guidance to $907-$913 million, reflecting a 30% growth at the midpoint, and expects a non-GAAP operating profit of $76-$80 million.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Welcome to Navan Inc.'s first quarter fiscal 2027 earnings call. this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 11. Again, we ask that you please limit yourselves to one question each.

As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Aurélien NOLF. Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead sir.

Aurélien NOLF

Thank you operator. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Navan's first quarter fiscal 2027 earnings conference call. With me today on the call are Ariel Cohen, our Chief Executive Officer and co founder and Michael Sindicich, our President. Ryan could not join us today, so I will get us started with our Safe harbor statement. During the course of today's call, we may make forward looking statements within the meaning of federal securities law. These forward looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including the risks and uncertainties described in our earnings press release, our annual report on Form 10K filed with the SEC on April the second 2026 and our other filings with the SEC. In addition, on today's call we will refer to non GAAP income and loss from operations, non GAAP operating margin, non GAAP gross margin and free cash flow which are non GAAP financial measures that provide useful information for investors. Reconciliations of these non GAAP financial measures to their corresponding GAAP financial measure to the extent reasonably available can be found in our earnings press release.

As a reminder, we published detailed prepared remarks on our IR website so you can read them over there. So with that behind us, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Navan CEO and Co founder Ariel Cohen.

Ariel Cohen (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder)

Hi welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today. I really hope that you had the opportunity to review our prepared remarks. This was an amazing quarter for us across the board. As you can see in our results we delivered on every business metric but more importantly we continue to innovate, continue to execute our vision of defining the future of travel. The second thing that I want to highlight is our go to market across the board. On every segment, on every activity we over delivered.

And lastly I'm going to talk about our AI leadership and our platform and the most important thing we are doing all of this. We are winning while innovating and the entire team is having fun while doing so. So first I will talk about our go to market. So we accelerated our go to market both in our sales led growth motion and in our product led growth motion. We've done an exceptional quarter in every geography, in every industry and in every company size.

And this is a continued momentum that has been around in Navan for quite some time. In addition, as we've discussed in the past, we are now using our strong balance sheet to accelerate our travel payment business. The attachment rates in this business have been growing, including on every customer base. And this actually emphasizes how strong the value of the integrated platform is. Our goal there is to be the best partner for our customers when it comes to travel and to travel payments.

And now we can actually do that. In addition to this, there is another thing that drove us forward and this is really the consolidation in the market. As you know, as you can see read food and used, a lot of our competitors are consolidating, changing their position, which actually drives all of the customers out there to reevaluate their solution to include us in a lot of RFPs. We reported it in the past that we see a massive growth in the RFPs and eventually to actually move to Navan.

They are sticking to a better performance from the system and to get an integrated solution that cover their entire travel payments and expense needs. And the last thing that drives our go to market is actually AI. Every company right now, every serious enterprise, every serious company in the world is having an AI initiative. This is driven from the top. It's a man that is coming from the C level, usually from the CEO. And the CEO is expecting to see more and more initiative in the company.

This actually means that Navan is one of the only AI vendors that is leading on an enterprise scale in the market. This makes us being included in the RFPs and we are also winning. And we can see that more and more customers are just choosing to migrate to our platform. In the product led growth, we also saw AI pushing us forward because it makes our marketing significantly more efficient. It actually allows us to scale faster and because of it, we're actually accelerating our customer acquisition there while staying efficient.

Now I want to talk about our platform, our product and our leadership around AI. So first of all, I want to remind you how complex the connectivity to the travel industry and the fintech industry is to build the global travel fintech solution. This is super, super, super complex. And Avan is the leader in that. As you can see across the quarter, we've announced More Direct connects NDCs to many more airlines, to many more hotels and many vendors that is out there.

And this actually improved the customer experience on the system. The second thing, as we've explained in the previous call, we are an generic platform. It means that we can reuse the same capability, the same connectivity to travel industry, the same wisdom, the same knowledge of everything that we've gathered over the years and we can deliver it to an AI agent across our platform and across many other platforms. The last thing I wanted to mention in the context of AI is really our platform.

We are the only ones that are actually doing an orchestration between AI agents and live people, live agents. This creates the best service that is out there, the best capabilities around personalizing whatever you need as a traveler, as a cfo, as an executive assistant, as a procurement leader, as an accountant, everybody that are participating in this fairly complex travel and expense execution. And the thing is that we are now doing it more and more using our own model.

This is an Navan model that is based on millions of interactions that we've gathered over the years. And recently we grew our usage of our own model to 30% from 20% and this has happened in few weeks. What it gives us is way more accurate, which means that actually our customers are happier. It also improves the efficiency, which means that gross margins are better and it allows us to grow much faster with AI use cases. So using our own model allows us to do that and probably one of the benefits that it's actually cheaper than the frontier model.

So the combination of real time connectivity to a world that is super complex, that the infrastructure is extremely fragmented with the AI technology allows us to define the future of business travel while accelerating our market penetration globally. I want to take this opportunity in this call really to thank the Navant team. The Navant team is really focusing on innovation, execution and making sure that our customers are super successful. I also want to thank our customers, our partners, our investors that are continuing to support us in this mission to make travel amazing for every frequent traveler.

And this was actually great time to spend time with Everybody in navigate 2026 where we have the opportunity to bring everybody together and really share our vision with you. So together we are not simply building a better travel company, we are defining the future of the travel industry. So thank you. And with that I will turn it over to our CFO Aurelian who will provide more details on our financial results and our outlook.

Aurélien NOLF

Many thanks Ariel. It's great to be here. Thank you all for joining us. As Ariel just mentioned, we really had an incredible start of the year in just three months here. I've been so impressed by the execution from the team, but also very impressed by the feedback that I'm receiving from our customers. I already had a chance to meet many of them and it's really great to see all the feedback that they are providing. They really care about the product that we are providing to them and the experience and that's obviously our top priority to make sure they are always super happy with the experience on the platform. All right, looking at the numbers in Q1 gross bookings reached $3.1 billion which was up 50% year over year and revenue was $220 million up 40% year over year.

So this acceleration in our business was driven by a super robust and resilient corporate travel environment, the ongoing strength of our PSG sales, the momentum. We have seen our SLG sales motion as well in the past quarters and all the new customers that have been ramping on the platform. During the quarter we had a non GAAP operating margin of 11% which was up 900 basis points compared to Q1 of last year, another quarter of significant margin expansion.

We are driving leverage across our P and L even as we invest and deliver amazing product innovation and focus on our very strong go to market strategy. We also ended the year with a very strong balance sheet with $681 million in cash and short term investment and a much improved free cash flow year over year with $2 million for the last 12 months versus a free cash flow burn of $52.4 million last year. So with that we expect this great momentum to continue for the rest of the year and we are raising our expectations for the full year fiscal 27. We now expect revenue between 907 and $913 million or a 30% growth at the midpoint. Non GAAP operating profit will be between 76 and $80 million, a 9% margin at the midpoint.

This guidance rate reflects really our strong performance in Q1, the momentum we are seeing in our go to market motions today and our high confidence and visibility into continued growth and profitability through the remainder of the year. For Q2 fiscal 27 specifically we expect revenue between $219 and $221 million which represents 28% growth. As we head into a seasonally slightly weaker summer season and non GAAP operating profit should be in the range of 13.5 to $14.5 million. We are seeing a great momentum across the platform and just to give you an example, Global enterprises are leaning in very heavily into the upcoming World cup in the US we are seeing right now hotel and flight bookings for business travel to the US World cup cities being up 46% year over year.

So in closing, fiscal 27 is off to a very fast start and we believe we are very well positioned to continue to drive momentum in this business. We are delivering what we think is a rare combination of growth acceleration at a very large scale and operating leverage at the same time while we invest in our growth. And with that, we're going to open it for questions. I'm particularly excited this quarter that we are opening the opportunity to individual investors to ask their questions directly to the management team. And so we will keep some time at the end of this session to answer the most avoided questions. And with that operator, we are ready for the questions.

OPERATOR

Certainly. And ladies and gentlemen, I just asked to remind you that please limit yourselves to one question each. Our first question comes from the line of Chris Quintero from Morgan Stanley. Your question please.

Chris Quintero (Equity Analyst)

Hey, Ariel. Hey Aurelian. Thank you for taking the questions here and congrats on a really solid quarter. I wanted to ask about cognition and what you've built here with this orchestration layer. Clearly seems like there's some special sauce in there. And so I'm curious how you thought about potentially selling that to other players in this space, given all the investments you've made into that layer to ultimately help your business.

Ariel Cohen (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder)

That's a really good question. Thank you. This is Ariel, by the way. So first of all, I think that from an AI perspective, the idea of combining what people can contribute, which is a certain type of wisdom, intuition, experience that we all have judgment, all of these things are super, super important and only people can provide it. Now, AI agents can do a lot of things and very effectively. We are coming out of the quarter with a lot of storms, TSA interruptions, war in the Middle East.

All of these things can create a lot of calls, a lot of interaction with our support with our travel agency. So you can actually ending up waiting for hours when you're calling us. What we've done with cognition we perfectly orchestrated when a human needs to speak with you and when an AI agent needs to speak with you. And sometimes it is combination of both and you would not even know you can talk with an AI agent and the human will intervene in the background and will do something.

So we realized that the best way to serve our customers on something that is very complex, business travel, complex travel, frequent travel, is Very complex when you're going to a business trip when the entire New York area is getting shut down for a few. The ability to combine the two perfectly is really the Navant secret sauce and that's why we are going so fast. This is why our NPS is at 45. This is why CSAT is at 97. This is the reason for that.

Now to your question. So can we take this technology farther and provide it to others? This is really what Navan Anywhere is all about. We've announced yesterday an integration to Google Gemini. I'm actually very excited. I've been using it. The ability to chat with Gemini and actually book a trip, support myself. Combining it in a discussion is so powerful. As of now, all of Navan customers that are using Google Gemini for enterprise can actually book Navan from our app.

They can use Gemini. They can basically use us from anywhere that they want to. So this is the first integration. This is the first time that we are doing it. But many more will come and this is really using the Cognition platform behind the scenes.

Chris Quintero (Equity Analyst)

Excellent. Thank you so much.

Jeremy Soller (Equity Analyst)

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jeremy Soller from Jeffries. Your question please. Hi, this is Jeremy on first on behalf of Samana. As we think about the transition of customers from the legacy retail Mackay platform on Navon, how should we think about I guess the margin expansion and the yield pressure that you called out, how much of that is already being realized in the quarter? And I guess maybe you can give an update on what you're seeing in terms of customer retention and maybe the timeframe before the customers will be the transition fully complete.

Aurélien NOLF

Hey Jeremy, this is Orlean. Your line was cutting a little bit, but I think your question is about the ridden Macai customer transition and the impact on our gross margin. So what I can tell you is we are this transition is all about what our customers want us to do, right? They are craving for the great platform we've been developing on the van and so this is a process that's going to happen in the next couple of years. So not something that had a meaningful impact or gross margin expansion in the first quarter.

This is going to happen over probably the next couple of years. But I can tell you that we already migrated some customers in the first quarter and this is going pretty well. One of them even upsell and we've been able to upsell and expand their usage of the platform to more products. So we are very excited about that. And I think if I longer term you're absolutely right. Reed Mackay Just because they have a lot of human agents that is providing support and basic needs to our customers has a lower gross margin profile.

So this is absolutely going to contribute and be a tailwind down the road.

Jeremy Soller (Equity Analyst)

Great, thanks for taking my question.

Nanoa Naperis (Equity Analyst)

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line Nanoa Naperis from Goldman Sachs. Your question please. Great, thanks for taking your question. On the point of go to market and sales productivity, we're curious what levers you can pull to keep the pipeline high. I mean the RFP stats that you've been disclosing with these triple digit growth rates, we're wondering how do we interpret those in the context of gbv?

Michael Sindicich

Yeah, hey, this is Michael Sinisich. Thanks for the question. So first of all, a couple ways. So we did announce that our RFP volume was up more than 200% year over year again for Q1. So we're really excited to see that momentum continues to be drawn to us. I mean I would say we've built a killer go to market engine and I've been here for 10 years. It really starts to feel like more and more customers are actually running to us versus us needing to spend a lot of time pushing and I think that will continue to grow. Right. So we want to deliver time savings, money savings and more and more. These days people realize that they need to deliver good user and support experiences to their employees who travel and generate revenues for the company.

And to what Ariel said earlier, I think we're one of the few companies, especially at an enterprise grade in scale that can actually demonstrate real AI use cases that the second you launch us you start seeing. So you see savings, you see booking times less than seven minutes compared to 45 and that level of support that's available 24 7, 365 in a bunch of different languages around the world to help you with your travels and your expenses. So I think that message is landing really really well. And as long as we can continue to build a great product to have happy customers that keep singing our praises, we hope to see continued acceleration in our go to market.

Aurélien NOLF

And what I would add to that from a growth bookings perspective. Just as a reminder, as I unpack how things are working with customer on the SLG motion, we usually need a couple months after we sign a deal to see the first bookings flowing through the platform and then a few months before the customers are fully ramped. So what gives us a lot of confidence go forward outlook is exactly that. Like everything that Michael and his team are selling now, we're Going to see the bookings impact on the platform down the road. So we are doing a much better job. We are accelerating and reducing that lag between the contract signature and the ramp. That's part of the reason why we over performed in Q1. Like we are being pretty effective there but there's still a lag. And so this is great because this is what's going to fuel the growth going forward.

Nanoa Naperis (Equity Analyst)

That makes sense. Thank you both.

Patrick Walravens (Equity Analyst)

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Patrick Walravens from Citizens. Your question please. Oh great. Thank you. And as you can hear from the background noise, I've been using your app on this trip. So look, my experience is just that this is such a superior experience as a, as a business traveler than Concur and American Express Global Travel. What is, I don't understand why every Global 2000 company isn't using it. And you'll get there but you know, Michael, I guess what are the things that block you? Like, it's a no brainer in terms of the solution.

What, what makes it hard to convert, you know, a big Fortune 500 company to Navon.

Michael Sindicich

Matt, we're hiring on the sales team. I think you'd be amazing for us. No, I'm just kidding. But really thank you. Thank you so much for using our product and singing our praises and I absolutely love, love, love the question. That same confidence that you have as an end user is what we bring into our sales and you know, I guess a couple of the staff that we talk about. So we now have 45 of the Fortune 500. It's up from I believe 28 a year ago. So we see us getting into more and more bigger deals and winning RFPs. And these are fees by the way. Take a long time, right? You need to build a relationship, you need to answer the questions, you need to talk through all the change management and the global scoping. But I think we see good acceleration into closing larger and larger big customers.

We do conferences like Navigate and customer advisory boards where we really understand our customers and we work with them to build the best solutions possible and they go sing our praises with our prospects. So we love that acceleration and that flywheel. And I think in general it just takes time like if you sign an RFP or if you sign a contract for a couple years. We can't get every customer to do an RFP immediately though we try to. And then those cycles take quite a while and then you also have to talk about the change management and the implementation. So I agree with you we think that we should take more market share, we think that we should take it faster and we think we're ready to scale further and further up market and hopefully this more than 200% increase in the RFPs, we can actually convert them and win more.

And we see our ASPs and our win rates increasing year over year. So we see great signs and we're excited. But there's no, unfortunately no magic wand to just rip out and replace really quickly. It takes work and justification and proof points and joint evaluation plans as we, as we usher people through the sale.

Aurélien NOLF

What I would add to that is the incredible momentum in our PLG business as well. Right. Which is directly addressing the unmanaged part of the business. And we grew revenue, we doubled the revenue in Q1 again year over year. So very, very good momentum there. And what's awesome is the go to market like the lag between the moment when we start interacting with the customer and when they start booking, it's very short and so it's a different kind of customers. But that's also, we also see our share growing there. So that's very exciting.

Michael Sindicich

And maybe one stat to add. Sorry, but the companies you mentioned around Amex we actually saw in Q1, 38% of our customer wins came from their cohort of companies. And so we do see ourselves accelerating further upmarket and taking market share from more of the legacy enterprise players.

Patrick Walravens (Equity Analyst)

Okay, thank you very much for all that perspective.

George Karasawa (Equity Analyst)

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of George Karasawa from Citi. Your question please. Hi, I'm on for Steve Enders. Thank you for taking the questions here. I wanted to ask about the revenue guidance raised for the full year. A really impressive increase there. Maybe you just unpack the drivers and assumptions. I think you called out three points. The tailwind of GBV in the quarter from price inflation, travel price inflation. Is that about similar to what's baked into the guide here or just any help in unpacking some of the changes in the assumptions?

Aurélien NOLF

Yeah, thank you Josh for the question. So we are obviously very, very excited about the momentum we're seeing in the business. Right. And that what informed directly our guidance going to 30% from 24% year over year growth previously. The reason is there's like many reasons to it. The first one is obviously Q1 performance was really great. We saw a lot of activity on the platform from existing customers, but also from those new customers that have been ramping pretty fast with us. So great execution there. On top of that we See the demand being very resilient. Right. Like the demand has been really high. People are traveling.

Companies are really, people are leveraging business travel to generate revenue for their own business by meeting with their customers, by making sure their teams have in person interactions. And so we believe this trend is going to continue for the remainder of the year. And then to address your question directly on inflation, so we wanted to disclose the impact of inflation on our bookings, not on our revenue in Q1. And that was 3% out of the 50% year over year growth. So I would say it's meaningful, but obviously a small part of the reason why we are growing that fast. We are prudent. It's very hard to forecast inflation. A lot of this inflation is coming from jet fuel, cost and things like that. And so that's obviously very uncertain. We see prices being Fairly stable in Q2 versus where they were at the end of the first quarter.

And then beyond that, we assume some stability there. But we will keep you updated on the way as we see new data. But for now, this is what is included in our 30% over year revenue guidance.

Ariel Cohen (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder)

I will add one thing to this that gives me actually a lot of confidence which this Q1 was very unique for me. It was the first time that I've seen so much travel disruption. I kind of talked about it earlier, but there was a major TSA shutdown. There were pretty big storms in the eastern part of the US There are some airline strikes in Europe. Dubai is a huge hub and obviously war over there. So we really saw how much business travel is important for our customers.

We didn't see any spike of cancellation. We did see some people changing the day of the trip, which by the way, this is again where AI and Ava, our chatbot are so important because if I can change my trip easily, I can actually very easily book another trip. So I'm maintaining the trips on the system. So seeing a quarter like this would so many interruptions and obviously providing these results gave us a lot of confidence regarding our guidance.

George Karasawa (Equity Analyst)

Excellent. That's excellent color. I also wanted to follow up on the calculated yield number came down a little bit. I know in the past that had been primarily driven by product mix. Just any commentary on what drove it in the quarter and how we should think about modeling that through the rest of the year. Thank you.

Aurélien NOLF

Yeah. So the yield is a direct output of everything we just discussed. Right. Which is the fact that our strategy is to aggressively gain share in this huge addressable market. And I think the pace of our bookings growth in Q1 is demonstrating that we are very successful there. So that's, you know, the higher the mix of enterprise customer in our mix of revenue that impacts the yield. But there's no changes within the different cohorts of customers or the different segments of customers. And we are not growing by giving more discounts or anything like that. This is again just a mixed play. Why do we love that to happen to us and why do we love that strategy is because our enterprise customers are larger, they are very sticky customers and they give us the opportunity to over time upsell and attach more products as well.

So really you should expect us to keep being very focused on growing our share over there. So that said, I shared some color commentary earlier this year about where we think yield is going to go. I'm not expecting any significant changes to what we've shared in the past, but the yield is very complex and is an output of many, many different puts and takes. And I can give you a couple examples of what would impact the yield one way or the other. So first of all, our enterprise business, if we keep accelerating the momentum, There we go. Depending on the how fast we ran those new customers. I would also mention our payment business. You've seen very, very strong payment volume growth in Q1 of 29% year over year. So clearly an acceleration versus what we've seen in the past. And here we are also playing with rebates that we can give to our customers.

So depending on how we construct our commercial relationship with our customers, there could be an impact on yield as well, up or down. And then lastly, I would mention the recent macai customers migration and the pace of that migration will have an impact on yield, but also would be very beneficial for gross margin. So in summary, we are very, very pleased with what we are seeing right now. Very fast market share gains that has an impact on yield.

But overall what we are doing as a management team and as a company is clearly driving a bigger, stronger and a more profitable business model over time.

George Karasawa (Equity Analyst)

That's great color. Thank you for taking the questions.

OPERATOR

Of course.

Sitif Hanagariki (Equity Analyst)

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Sitif Hanagariki from Mizzou. Your question please.

Chad Tvbaugh (Equity Analyst)

Hey, great, thanks guys. This is Chad Tvbaugh on here for Citi. I wanted to talk about sort of the operating margin raise for the full year. Really strong now at 9%. I guess taking a step back, you know, given the really strong top line momentum that you guys have seen over the last few quarters, you know, how are you thinking about the balance of sort of, you know, ramping OPEX investments more aggressively to capture this demand that you're seeing versus passing it on to the bottom line. And. Thank you.

Aurélien NOLF

Yeah, this is a great question. Thank you. This is actually a debate we have every week, every day, every month as a management team. Right. This is very, very important because we are very focused on growing the business and making sure more and more customers can put their hands on our platform, which, you know, we see very, very good results there. And to be able to do that, we are investing, right? And we are investing. You can see that we are investing marketing and sales motions with very, very attractive payback. Something that I really like to see and we discuss again all the time.

Having said that, we are also committed to expanding our margins, which I think we've been very successful over the last couple of years at demonstrating that we have this ability, which I think is pretty unique, to grow the business very fast, but at the same time being very, very disciplined. So the way we are achieving that is we look at our OPEX envelope and then we allocate our resources wherever it makes sense. And so we are seeing efficiencies in our research and development costs. A lot of that is driven by AI and team being very, very efficient at releasing new products. You've seen the velocity of the new product release increase significantly. So we're very, very proud of that. And we are generating efficiencies there, which is also the case on gna, where we are very, very disciplined.

So I'm very, very excited to be able to expand margin, raise our guidance for operating margin going forward. But also we are very focused on our number one goal, which is to keep getting share and grow this business very, very fast. So very pleased to be able to achieve both at the same time.

Jed Kelly (Equity Analyst)

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly from Oppenheimer. Question, please. Hey, great. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess I'll ask a more travel focused one. It seems like you're having good momentum with ndc, announced a partnership with, and it seems like it's going well. So just how should we think about ndc? And then just further, if I kind of look at your growth and where you are, seems like in the last 10 years, it's you and Airbnb are the two most successful new travel companies over the last decade. So how should we think about, you know, Navon potentially expanding into other travel verticals? Potentially leisure. Thanks.

Ariel Cohen (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder)

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for this question. So, first of all, the way that we look at every decision that it comes to the actual product and service. We always, always, always start with a customer. We are always asking what is the best thing for our customers. And the reason that the Navant platform is connecting really to everything, through everything. So means to everything. It means every airline, low cost airline, regular airlines, every hotel, every hotel's chain, every aggregator that is out there, every GDS that is out there, and we are doing it globally.

The reason that we are doing it is that we know that our travelers, the EAs, everybody that are using the system want to make sure that they can trust this system. On the Navan system, you don't have this thing that you will search in a van and then you will Google it and you'll find something cheaper outside. It's actually the opposite. So it is very, very important for us to make sure that we are connected to everything. NNDC connecting directly to airlines is something that allows us to make sure that we have the right prices in the system, but also it allows us to merchandise.

It allows us to sometimes combine your wi fi and your club access and your flight obviously in the time of booking. And this is unique to Novan. It allows us to have information that usually you don't get on a platform that says book your trip, such as are you likely to have a flight delay? And information like that. So it is very powerful technology, but our approach is to just connect to everything that provide really good services for our customers.

Now, when you provide NDC infrastructure with everything that I've mentioned earlier about AI, you are creating something really, really powerful for our customers.

Jed Kelly (Equity Analyst)

Thank you.

Jared Levine (Equity Analyst)

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line. Jared Levine from TD Cowan. Your question please. Thank you. To start, can you talk about some of the traction you've seen so far with Navon Edge and how that's contributing to growth so far this year?

Ariel Cohen (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder)

Yeah, definitely. So let me share with you what I'm focusing on and I'm looking at the Novant Edge. The first of all, it's actually a product on the early stages of development. So I'm really monitoring the pace of innovation. I'm monitoring if every week this product is becoming better and better and better. By the way, everybody on this call can download the product so you can actually try it out. And if you're looking at it, you could see that a month ago we didn't have flights there and now we have flights in a really very powerful way. So now you can actually use the entire use case, which includes flights, hotels, cars, restaurants, everything, events, everything. That you want. So first of all, it's the product that's the first thing that I'm focused on. The second thing is acquisition.

Are we bringing users to the system and we see the trends there better than what we were expecting. But then comes the next thing, are we converting them and the most important thing, are they coming again? So all of our internal stats are ahead of our plan for Navanage. So we are very, very happy of what we see them. And I'm just looking forward in the future to start to show some navon edge numbers. But right now we are still keeping it internally.

Jared Levine (Equity Analyst)

And then the key question we've gotten from investors in terms of the, you know, healthy large enterprise signings that you did in the second half of last year, how those are going to layer into GBV growth this year? Any color you can kind of provide in terms of thinking about that growth impact this year from those signings.

Aurélien NOLF

Yeah, so what I would say, so what Generally speaking, what we've explained again is two months delay between the signature of the contract and the first booking and then anywhere between five and six months to get to a full ramp for enterprise customers. Recently we had lots of success with very big accounts that have been able to ramp much faster than that. So what I would say here is it's hard for me to give you an exact number. And the reason is every customer is different and obviously the larger the organization, the longer of time it's taking for them to fully ramp. They have adoption programs like we run a lot of, we do a lot of work with them. What I've been very impressed is by our ability to learn from those very large launches. And we are getting better. Right?

Like the team now has a very structured program to accelerate this, these ramps and this will fuel the growth going forward. But again, every customer is different, some of them are very large. And so if we are able to ramp them up quickly, then there's a pretty fast impact on our top line.

Jared Levine (Equity Analyst)

Great, thank you. Thank you.

Blair Abernathy (Equity Analyst)

And our next question comes from the line of Blair Abernathy from Rosenblatt Securities. Your question please. Thanks very much and congrats on the great quarter guys. Just wanted to understand, you called out this largest ACV deal in the company history and I wonder if you could provide any other color around that. Is it a long standing customer or a relatively new customer? And just in terms of the average new customer, land size, deal sizes, how is that been trending this year? Yeah, great question. First of all, happy to say that it was not a customer of any of our products before they signed on with us. So this was an end to end, as we call internally customer, where we sold travel payments and expense management.

And what I can say about that is, you know, we're growing our payments and expense business and capabilities upmarket very quickly. We get current customers to learn from that. We can continue to work with and build our products. And as we sell to larger and larger customers, the requirements are more unique. Right. So if I have travelers in Poland, there's Polish per diem's, which are different. If my car in Austria weighs more than two kilos, I get a different reimbursement rate than less.

And so there are very, very fine differences in different markets around the world that we are continuing to scale with our customers in, which lets us land larger and larger customers at the point of sale, but also when we go and upsell them afterwards. And it's been great to see. So what we say and what we see is our ASPs. So when you think about ASPs, we're essentially taking in all the various revenue components from the products that we're selling that customer.

They are increasing year over year really nicely. It also adds a stickier product, so we have more things to offer, more things to basically work with the customer to provide more value. And we think that that's stickier. And our products are getting more and more mature very fast on both the travel, the expense and the payment side. So, yeah, that's all I can say about that. Just really excited to see the momentum and we hope to keep selling small customers all the way up to very large ones.

Great, thank you.

Nafeesta Gupta (Equity Analyst)

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Nafeesta Gupta from BofA Securities. Your question, please. Hi. Thank you. So you've highlighted both PLG revenue doubling YOY and enterprise SLG momentum. Where among the two are you seeing the strongest ROI today? If you can break that down. Sorry, we had, I think, the line cut. I could not catch the question. Do you mind repeating the question? Yeah. So my question is that you highlighted both PLG momentum with revenue doubling year on year, and then enterprise SLG momentum as well. And so among these, where are you seeing the strongest roi?

Aurélien NOLF

Yeah, so very, very, very good question. And we actually see a very high return on both motions. Right. They are. Those customers have different characteristics, obviously on the PFG side. So we double the revenue in Q1 year over year again. And what we are seeing there is a very. We have a very effective way to market and spend marketing Dollars. I think I mentioned that we also leveraging AI to do that in a very, very effective way. So the payback is going to be pretty fast, right? We see faster payback there. However, on the SLG motion we invest more upfront because we have a sales team and we pay commissions whenever we sign the deal. But those customers are going to be larger and more sticky and so the payback is going to be a little bit longer but still very, very attractive because those customers are going to be very sticky and we have the opportunity to upsell over time.

So what I would say is really we are focusing on growing both and so we're not going to choose between the two again. Different characteristics, different speed to market, different return rate, but both being very, very attractive.

Nafeesta Gupta (Equity Analyst)

Got it. And if I can squeeze another one. So you guided Q2 to slightly slower growth. 28% growth. Yoy. How much is that? How much of that is purely seasonality versus building in any conservatism on the demand aspect?

Aurélien NOLF

Yeah. So on Q2 I mean we are still getting to a very great growth. Obviously we are, we are a usage based business. I mean we discussed about the dynamics around the macro and the demand and inflation which are things that are very hard for us to forecast. I mean so far it's been very strong, but those are the kind of things we are considering. When we said guidance, my goal is to always provide a guidance where we have a good confidence that we can achieve. But yeah, we are very, very pleased with the growth rate for Q2 and the rest of the year.

Nafeesta Gupta (Equity Analyst)

Thank you.

Andrew De Gaspari

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Andrew De Gaspari from bmp. Your question please. Thanks. I just wanted to ask first, the 20 to 30% path in terms of the AI calls going to your models is pretty impressive in a matter of weeks. And I just wanted to touch on. You know you mentioned you could get to beat a majority at one point. I was just wondering, you know, how long would it take to get there? And do you think that's something that can be measured in a matter of months or do you think it would take longer than that?

Ariel Cohen (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder)

Yeah, that's a really good question. And in a way it actually related to the previous question about the PLG and slg. Because what really allows us to improve the unit economics and the gross margins is this model. Right. So as this model accelerates, our economics are getting better. That's why we are actually happy with both motions. So in terms of how fast we can go to more and more coverage by Ourselves, we are seeing really good results as we are pushing the model more and more. The reason is really all of this endless millions of discussions that have been doing, we were doing in the last 10 years with our customers. We are using this data and this data is so tuned to travel that it actually has significantly less parameters than the parameters that you see on a Frontier model.

So it's actually faster when you chat with us, for example, with Ava or Navanadge, it is significantly faster results than what we're going to see if we are connecting to a Frontier model. So that's one thing. It is significantly more accurate. It creates better CSAT customer satisfaction with our customers. But when we also combine it with other components of our AI platform such as memory. Memory is the ability to know you personally to try to understand what do you need from us. So we combine the two, it makes the platform super, super powerful. So I will not give you guidance on how fast can we grow to a better coverage, but I can definitely tell you that it's an area of focus for our AI team and we are actually very, very bullish on our capabilities there.

Andrew De Gaspari

That's very helpful. And then I'm only mentioning this because on the this was mentioned earlier in the call and the question about is about the World Cup. You did mention that it drove travel like in terms of flight and hotel bookings up significantly. And you know, the reason I'm asking this is like when we think about our model for next year, just want to make sure is there is this like a pretty significant bump in the revenue tied to the World cup and maybe even the Olympics in the first quarter? Because I would have thought that's more like leisure related as opposed to corporate travel, but just making sure if there was any benefit.

Aurélien NOLF

No, I would not think about it as a very significant driver. I think the reason why we wanted to share those data points is because we wanted to highlight the residents in the business trouble. Like people are really, really focused on getting together. I'm assuming a lot of those trips are customer invitations. And so our customer really want in person interactions. And for us it's a great sign. And we are seeing this activity on the platform. But given the number of games and the number of cities, when you think about more than $3 billion bookings in Q1, for example, that would not be a significant driver.

Andrew De Gaspari

Thank you very much.

OPERATOR

Thank you. I'd now like to hand the program back to Orlean Nouf, Chief Financial Officer.

Aurélien NOLF

Yeah, thank you. So for the first time this quarter, we are very, very Excited to be able to receive questions from our individual investors. So by the way, we're going to do that going forward. Highly encourage all of you to just use the platform and ask your questions. So I think the first one is for you, Ayo. It's coming from Victor S. Who's asking what does the present market consistently misunderstand about Navan and what does Navan look like in 10 years if everything goes right?

Ariel Cohen (Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder)

When I'm thinking about this answer, it's really, I would say in the root of everything that we are thinking about when we are thinking about Navan. Because you really need to ask yourself the question in this, in this era, right in the next 10 years, what's going to happen? And of course everybody are talking about AI. I think there is also always a political uncertainty. There are a lot of things and our point of view regarding to this is that all of this makes human connections more important. The power of being there, the power of meeting you in person, the power of understanding your culture, all of these are very, very, very important. We also believe that it might be that people will have more time. So all of these things mean that travel will become bigger and bigger and bigger in the years to come.

And I think that's the first thing, that maybe there is an underestimation of the size of the time in this unique era. The second thing is our leadership, the staff that we have developed the infrastructure to connect to everything that is out there, to deeply embed it with AI gives Navan really powerful platform to take the entire market. So we believe that the market is going to a certain direction that will make travel very, very important. And we believe that we will be the leaders. So how powerful the platform is is super important to understand. And I would say the last thing probably people need to understand how strong the Navantim is, how resilient we are and how much we are having fun doing that. And I think this is what makes us so successful.

Aurélien NOLF

Great, thank you. Very exciting vision. So next question is from Terence S for you, Michael. And Terence is asking us, does Navan look to acquire or partner with any companies in the near future?

Michael Sindicich

Yeah, great question. So first of all, I want to say we have a strong track record of successful acquisitions around the globe. We acquired from Travo in the DOC region, Reed mackay in UK and other places around the world. Tripier in India, Resia in Sweden, another one in Italy and on and on. So we're always looking at evaluating opportunities for growth. What I'll say is the bar for M and A is really high. We see acquisitions as a tool, not as our growth strategy. And you can see that in our 50% year over year GBV growth, which is not based on acquisitions. So we really like our organic growth. And so when I think about who we're looking to acquire, what opportunities to go after, it's about accelerating our go to market strategy or the company vision.

It's about extending the platform and offering really travel adjacent categories such as meetings and events or VIP services. And of course the most obvious one is expanding our service and operations and licenses globally as we sell and keep working with more and more global and larger customers when it comes to partnerships by the way. So we have many, many partners across the payment space, the expense space and the travel supplier space. And really, really excited about the new partnership we talked about yesterday, which is the integration into Gemini. And that's all about allowing our customers to be able to access the Navon infrastructure from whatever UI or interface they're working in today. So I think that that's going to be great and we hope to do many more of them. So that was that one.

Now I'll ask you this one Aurelian, but this is from Amna F who said what are your long term plans for the company that would bring some dividends to your investors.

Aurélien NOLF

Yeah, awesome question. I think this question is really about when are we going to be GAAP profitable? Right. And so what I would say is we have not shared any timeline for this as a company. However, we've been discussing on this call that we are very focused on margin expansion overall. And so I'm assuming I'm expecting GAAP profitability to come naturally at some point. But really right now what we are focused on is finding the right balance between growth and investing in that growth. I'm very excited to be able to raise our non GAAP operating margin guidance to 9% for the year. And that's exactly what we are doing. Being very focused on coming up with new innovation, investing in our go to market engine and fueling growth.

So over time as our business is going to mature, we will see even more operating leverage, right? That is going to come from AI driven automation, from our models, from the within macai migration from the growth of the business overall. So all those growth and margin expansion drivers that we've been discussing and I'm very pleased that we've been free cash flow positive for the first time in fiscal 2026, which was a huge milestone for the company and we are expecting to do that again in fiscal 27. So, yeah, very. I think we are on a great trajectory, but again, no timeline. Great. So I think with that, we are ready to close this session.

I really want to thank you all for listening and for your interest and support to Nagana.

OPERATOR

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.

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