Oren Zeev turns early Navan bet into $1 billion payday
The early Israeli investor retains a major holding alongside Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz.
The biggest beneficiary of the Navan IPO is Oren Zeev, an Israeli investor who operates as a one-man venture capital fund from Silicon Valley and has backed numerous Israeli unicorns. Zeev was the company’s first investor and, on the eve of the IPO, held 18.6% of its shares. After selling a small portion and accounting for dilution, his stake now stands at 16%, valued at approximately $1 billion based on the IPO valuation.
This makes Zeev the second-largest shareholder after Lightspeed Venture Partners, which retained a 21.4% stake following the IPO, followed by Andreessen Horowitz with 11%.
Navan’s founders, Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig, hold a special class of shares that grants them majority voting rights.
Zeev, a former general partner with the venture capital arm of Apax Partners, first invested in Cohen and Twig’s startup in 2013, writing a $50,000 check, two years before the founding of Navan (then TripActions).
Zeev is a one-person VC firm, having no office and no one on payroll. His portfolio includes 50 companies.
Navan priced its initial public offering at $25 per share on Wednesday, raising $923.1 million in one of the largest U.S. technology listings this year.
The Palo Alto-based company sold 30 million new shares to raise $750 million, while existing shareholders sold an additional 6.9 million shares, according to the company’s filing. The final price sits comfortably within its marketed range of $24 to $26, giving Navan an implied valuation of $6.21 billion.
