Dive Brief:

• Fintech Navan appointed former New York Stock Exchange CFO Amy Butte its finance chief starting this month as the company eyes an upcoming initial public offering.
• The move comes approximately two months after the Palo Alto, California-based travel and expenses app appointed Butte to its board of directors as audit committee chair, according to an April press release. As part of the move to CFO, Butte will step down from her role as audit committee chair, the fintech said in a Monday press release.
• “After meeting Amy, we quickly decided that she was the right person to take Navan into its next stage of growth,” Navan co-founder and CEO Ariel Cohen said in a statement included in the release.

Dive Insight:

Navan has yet to set a date for its coming IPO, but the fintech will look to draw upon Butte’s 25 years of financial experience as it preps to go public. Butte acted as financial leader for the New York Stock Exchange during its historic pivot to a publicly traded entity in 2006, serving as CFO of the NYSE for a two-year period beginning in 2004.

Starting her career at Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns, Butte’s previous experiences include roles at Credit Suisse and MF Global, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also serves as a member of the board for fintech Stash, as audit committee chair for cloud computing service DigitalOcean, and as a strategic adviser for the Long-Term Stock Exchange.

Butte’s appointment is part of a number of leadership changes recently undertaken by the fintech. Also in April, Navan announced its former chief revenue officer, Rich Liu, would be rejoining the company as CEO of Navan Travel. The newly-created role focuses on growing the travel segment, drawing on Liu as an “expert on scaling companies from seed to IPO,” the company said in a press release.

Last valued at $9.2 billion, Navan has raised approximately $1.5 billion in venture funding to date. Reports of a public listing by the expense management company come as the IPO market appears to be slowly recovering from a years-long slump; U.S. public offerings raised $8.4 billion during the first quarter of this year or more than triple the amount raised in Q1 2023, CFO Dive previously reported.

Navan’s path to becoming public has been anything but straightforward, however. Founded as TripActions, a business that allowed for travel-based expense tracking, the company was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic — so hard its revenue dropped to zero, according to comments by CEO Cohen.

It pivoted to focusing more broadly on spend management, a move which drew in more funding and left it comfortable enough to reportedly file confidential paperwork in 2022 for an IPO that was set to take place in 2023, according to a Business Insider report which cited an unnamed source.

However, the planned date of the IPO slowly inched forward, moving from 2023 to April 2024 and then to April of next year, according to BI reports. Meanwhile, the company continued to fundraise and renamed itself Navan in 2023 after deciding to consolidate its travel and expense services into a single app, underpinned by a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT capabilities to the platform, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The restructuring of its leadership team is not the only sign that an IPO might be nearing for the fintech. Navan laid off about 5% of its staff in December 2023 — approximately 145 people — as it zeroed in on profitability, according to an Information report at the time. The company is on track to achieve profitability this year, Cohen told CNBC in an interview last month. While declining to give a date, Navan is inching closer to an IPO, Cohen told the publication.

Navan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.