Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi and Navan CEO Ariel Cohen announce a partnership integrating Brex's corporate card with Navan's travel platform. Navan's AI already cuts travel costs by 20-30% and support expenses by 50%, with the combined offering projected to reduce overall T&E spend by roughly 30%.
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A new partnership in the corporate expense world. Brex and Navant are teaming up to create a seamless travel management and card solution for businesses to take on legacy players like Incur and Amex. Joining me here at CNBC San Francisco bureau for an exclusive interview is Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi and Navant CEO Ariel Cohen. Both companies are featured on our latest CNBC Disruptor 50 list. And of course, my own Fort Knox viewers will be familiar with both companies. Thanks for being here in person with me. So Pedro, I thought of you guys as kind of like competitors before. Not, not complete overlap, but in that, you know, fintech unicorn space. Why team up?
Yeah. So for us, I think there's been so much admiration over the years for the work that Ariel Franceschi and the Navant team have done on the travel side. And it really came down to speaking to customers as we spoke to them and try to understand what are their needs to solve really enterprise travel. It comes down— it's more than just payments and it's more than just travel. And then looking to customers and talking about it internally, we spend the past 7, 8 months just building this collective solution that we believe is the best-in-class solution across— if you have enterprise travel and you require enterprise corporate cards together into one.
Here's why I think this partnership is potentially really important for public market investors to watch. Besides the fact that we know that you at least are looking at coming public sometime relatively soon. And that is because right now there are questions about when AI really starts to drive measurable results. And corporate expense management is a huge potential savings area in enterprise fintech. So Ariel, how long before we get to, to see some case studies on that? And so far in what you've seen from this partnership, what do you think the potential is?
Yeah, first of all, I think I'll join Pedro Franceschi. First of all, meeting the team, the teams have a lot, a lot of alignment and it's actually working really well. And we are there to provide the best solution in the market around T&E. And when I say best solution, it comes down to saving costs. So people that are using Navant today will save 20 to 30% of their entire travel cost. And I think that when you join forces here, you actually have a potential to save 30% on your entire T&E. And then AI is a really big part of it because you have the opportunity to pinpoint to here is an expense that you don't need to have. Here is a potential to save money. And we saw it, we see it in the platform, on both platforms. But when you talk about real use cases, I can tell you that Navant today, we are saving 50% of our support costs by using AI. And that goes to the customer because we are actually pricing stuff differently. We are more competitive in the marketplace. So I think this solution together and utilizing AI is, is becoming really, really important part of the customers.
Pedro, you've had some fast growth. You've also had some cuts, right? Post-SVB, you had some fast growth and then you sort of pulled back. You did some layoffs. Where are we now with companies watching their bottom lines? And so you would think that that could be a bit of a restraint on demand, but they're looking to save money, which might also be driving demand, which is outweighing the other.
It's actually perfect for us for that exact reason. So, you know, we, we have Brex. We say that we like to eat our own dog food, try our own products first. And we decreased our burn rate by 70% just over the past year. And that's really about us becoming more efficient as a company. And when it came to customers, they all come to us saying, hey, there's all these new technologies out there. How can I use this back to improve my business? And we're seeing these new use cases around AI, around the expense management, for example, and how much time it requires to, you know, fill out documentation, memos, receipts. I was just showing Ariel on the way here, we went out for lunch, I swiped my card and the expense gets populated automatically. Who I am with, the memo, the reason, and all of that is an AI assistant doing, typically the way you would have a traditional EA doing in the back in the day. And then you have on the other side, on the accounting side, there's so much manual process that goes into closing the books. And one of the technologies that we've built that we've seen a lot of success with customers is just really helping them increase the efficiencies in how they go close their books to do things that are not just 20 or 30% better, but like really 3 to 4 to 5 times better and faster than what they used to do before, both in terms of, you know, the cost savings, of course, but also just more accuracy than a human would have doing that manually.
