With eyes on global growth, Navan raised a $304M Series G (combination of equity and debt) at a $9.2B valuation late last year. You can see Navan’s funding and acquisition history on its CB Insights profile here.
It faces well-funded startup competitors like Brex and Ramp (both of which are pushing into the travel category) as well as incumbents like AmEx and Concur.
Do jumbo-sized financings translate to long-term growth?
When we previously looked at this question, we found that after an IPO, the most highly funded startups actually tend to underperform those that raised less.
This is what we dubbed the “foie gras’ing” of startups.
Here’s an updated look at some of the more notable offenders of the past few years (including SPACs), i.e, where the current market cap is less than total funding raised.
Hot: Google AI researchers
Six years ago, Google researchers published a paper that introduced the “Transformer."
This new neural network architecture represented a major breakthrough in natural language processing.
Companies like OpenAI benefited from this research by incorporating the architecture into the large language model (LLM) that powers ChatGPT.
Since then, 6 of the 8 authors have founded companies and raised significant funding.
And 2 of the companies have already become unicorns (valued at $1B+).
Learn more about these founders and the companies they’ve created in this research brief.
Not: Frank
The founder of Frank was arrested for fraud last week.
JP Morgan acquired the college financial planning platform for $175M in September 2021.
Not good.
The idea that SaaS and financial services companies should acquire media companies remains intact. Read why here.
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