More than a decade ago, in a coffee shop in Palo Alto, two young entrepreneurs and Oren Zeev, founder of Zeev Ventures, a one-man investment empire, sat down. "There was no company, no employees, just the two entrepreneurs and me," he recalls. "We raised a toast to ‘the success of the venture,’ and then we decided to go for it." He later said he wrote them the check as an "investment in a relationship." That decision gave birth to TripActions, later renamed Navan.
At the end of last month, after several crises, Navan, which has developed a platform for managing business travel with payment and corporate expense services, held its IPO on Nasdaq. At a company valuation of $6.2 billion Navan was the biggest Israeli IPO on Wall Street since Mobileye in 2022. But unlike Mobileye, Navan's debut in New York was not easy. On the first day of trading, the stock plunged 20%, and today it is already more than 30% beneath the IPO price with a market cap of only $4.4 billion.
Zeev, one of the biggest investors in the company, is not perturbed. "Of course I would like it to be 20% above and not 20% below, and maybe the initial performance was disappointing, we didn't expect it," he admits, "but you have to put things in perspective - what matters is the business.
"By definition, a successful IPO is one in which the company raised the money it wanted to raise." Everything else, he stresses, is just noise. "In general, there is a very low, if any, correlation - perhaps even a negative one - between the performance of the stock on the first day and the long-term performance, which is a function of how good the business is."
From a broader perspective of Wall Street IPOs this year, Zeev challenges the idea of the "IPO window," - the assumption that there are periods of prosperity in which companies can be listed, and less favorable periods in which it is difficult to impossible to bring hold a flotation.
He insists, "This is a myth. You can always hold an IPO if the company is ready and good enough. It is true that there are periods in which it is easier to get a good price, and there are periods in which it is more difficult but to say that the window is closed and that there is no possibility is simply false."
Israel-biased networking
Navan's story is unusual in the Israeli landscape. It is difficult to find information about the founders and the history of the company, and the connection to the country was only built at a later stage. "It started with Mercury, an Israeli software company that built tremendous scale and brought excellent people to the industry," says Zeev, describing how the path was paved from there to his meeting with two Mercury alumni, Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twigg, who later founded Navan.
Navan’s development center in Israel was only established years later, "When a senior executive at the company wanted to return to Israel," says Zeev. Since then, the local office has grown significantly. "There are a hundred or so developers in Israel, and the entire PLG field - that is, product-led growth - is led from Israel. There are at least two senior managers at a global level here."
Zeev's entire investment philosophy is based on the principle of working with people he believes in. "I almost always invest in people I already know, or in proposals that came to me through entrepreneurs from the portfolio that I am already invested in. For example, this week I am making a new investment - in a business of guys who worked for an entrepreneur of one of the successes in my portfolio," he says. "You can see this as networking that is very biased towards the Israelis, because of the large representation of Israelis in the portfolio."
Earlier this year saw the sale of Next Insurance, which was an early investment by Zeev that became a significant exit, but also a lesson in modesty and market cycles. Next Insurance, in the US small business insurance sector, was sold last March to German insurance firm Munich Re for $2.6 billion. This after it had been valued at $4 billion but underwent layoffs in 2022 and a decline in value at the end of 2023 to $2.5 billion.
A lone wolf: Zeev enjoys working alone
Zeev’s first exit was in 2008, by a company that he had invested in the 1990s, when he was working at US fund Apax Partners. Zeev had sought struggling publicly-traded companies with potential, and invested $11 million of the fund's money in Audible, a book-reading company that crashed in the dot-com crisis. He took over 40% of the shares, and in 2007 the company was sold for $310 million - an exit with a profit of over 10 times the investment.
What began then as a modest personal investment venture based on opportunities from his social network, over time became Zeev Ventures - a massive investment enterprise that now has an estimated more than $2.5 billion in assets under management.
Zeev began operating as an independent investor, an angel, after leaving Apax Partners in 2007, but his fund was not officially founded until 2015, when he also began investing money from external investors.
To date, Zeev Ventures has invested in more than 50 companies, most in the software field and with Israeli connections. Among them: fintech giants (payment companies Tipalti and Sunbit), digital insurance company (Next Insurance) and even unicorns like Navan. But what is unique is that Zeev does everything completely alone: without partners, without employees, and he doesn’t even have an administrative assistant.
In this respect, Zeev has no peer in the industry. Zeev Ventures is the largest fund in the world managed by a single investor, without partners. He serves as a director in 35 of the 50 companies in which he has invested, while he is directly involved in the investment and usually holds the largest share of the shares distributed to the first investors, 20-30% of the company's capital. This makes him one of the most influential people in Israeli tech, even though he lives in Silicon Valley.
"This is the way I work and it simply suits me very well," Zeev has previously told "Globes." "Most people believe they need a team around them, I'm fine working without one. I'm very efficient. Because I don't have an organization, I save a lot of work; I don't have to coordinate anything with anyone, I don't have to convince people. No one has to write papers, and I don't have to read other people's papers."
One of the major turning points in Zeev's life was when he met Palantir chairman Peter Thiel, a mega investor close to US President Donald Trump. Thiel was the one who convinced Zeev to found a venture capital fund in his name. The first capital that Zeev raised in 2007 was given to him by Thiel as the only external investor. "We actually met under different circumstances in a large group, and we arranged to meet one-on-one," Zeev recalls. "Until then, I had been investing my own money, but I behaved like a fund. And still, to everyone who asked if I wanted to turn this activity into an institutional fund, I answered no."
But Thiel surprised him. "He said to me: 'Why don't you let me be your investor and we'll treat it as a trial both ways - you'll see for yourself if it's right for you, and so will I.' Usually, when you raise a venture capital fund, you commit to your investors for a long period - but what suited Peter was the fact that it was an experiment without commitment. I didn't have to prepare slides or do due diligence on a process that was imposed on me from the outside. We set a period of one year, or $20 million - and whatever ends first would end the trial period," recounts Zeev.
"An existential crisis is a 'must'"
The journeys he takes with the companies he invests in always include "moments of truth," and as Zeev puts it: "There is no company I have invested in that has existed for more than six years that has not gone through an existential crisis."
Navan is a clear example of this. Until Covid, the company was growing rapidly, but then the pandemic arrived and turned it from a growing business into an existential leadership test. "Navan would have looked amazing," Zeev says. "Crazy growth, there was already a thousand employees, everything was running ahead, and then suddenly within two weeks all the revenue crashed towards zero. There was no way to know if it would ever return to what it was."
The pessimism was almost a consensus at the time. "People said, 'We've gotten used to Zoom, we won't have to travel to meetings anymore.' The biggest question mark imaginable hung over everything," Zeev recalls. And in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, the pressure was double, with employees well aware of the value of their options. "At that time, Zoom, Data Dog and Snowflake were exploding in a positive sense," he recalls. "Salespeople, marketing people, developers, could easily move to companies that were on the rise, so how would we keep employees? It was a crazy test of leadership. On the one hand, to tell the truth, and on the other hand, to give the feeling that it would be okay, that we would come out of it stronger."
The situation revealed "world-class leadership ability" on the part of CEO Ariel Cohen, in Zeev’s opinion. "Very few people in the world have passed such a test, and Ariel and Ilan (cofounders) passed it with flying colors. Not that people didn’t leave, but compared with what could have happened, they kept almost the entire management team and most of the engineers and sales team."
But tough decisions were also required at that time. "You have to fire all at once," says Zeev. "And they were the first company to fire, and they were criticized a lot for it, because they fired over Zoom. Even though there was no other way to fire in those days." He describes management that acted quickly and without hesitation. "Without being afraid of what they would say, but acting as quickly as possible, to adapt the size of the company to the new situation."
At the same time, Navan completely changed its product focus. Emphasizing travel, "We shifted the center of gravity to expenses, that is, to the business expenses sector," says Zeev. "This is a fundamental change that affected both the revenue mix and how the market sees the company." Travel itself was not abandoned, it simply received a new interpretation - safety above all. "When travel began to gradually return, we focused on the ability of an organization to know at any moment where the employee is on the trip, and how to protect him," he explains. At the same time, on the financial front, an almost impossible move to raise capital took place. "Raise money in April 2020?! "It was amazing," Zeev enthuses. "They closed a very significant round from a very serious fund."
That crisis was the first of several. But Zeev reiterates that this is exactly the job. "In a company where everything is going well, the leadership is not really being tested." And from here he draws a direct line to Navan's first day of trading on Nasdaq. "After what we went through with Covid and a few other tests," he smiles, "that the stock will drop by 20%? That's complete nonsense. We'll build the business, and the stock will bounce back."
"Don't miss out on successes"
Zeev's investment philosophy, as well as long-term personal connections, is also based on quick decisions. "I really usually decide within 24 hours, 48 at most," he says. He is aware that this approach is not suitable for every field, but in venture capital investments, the asymmetry, he claims, works to his advantage: "In our business, what matters are the successes, the failures less so. When you lose, you lose the money once. When you are right and it succeeds, you can earn much more." He exemplifies this with Navan, where "I am currently making about 100 times my initial investment." That is, only on the first investment he made, and later he added more investments. His personal profit from Navan's IPO was around a $1 billion.
On the company's transition to public trading, he is convinced that although "You’re under a magnifying glass, and every quarter you have to tell the world what you look like, in the end it is the same business. Some things become easier, others more difficult, but the business identity does not change." And what's next? For him, Navan’s IPO is just the beginning. "I have other companies on the horizon for IPOs in the next two years," he reveals.
He returns to his guiding principle on Navan: "In the end, the stock will catch up with the business, not the other way around. We will continue to build, and the market will know how to price it."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on November 9, 2025.
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