Ariel Cohen

• Company: NAVAN
• Title: CEO
• Valuation: $9.2 BILLION
• Type: TRAVEL EXPENSE MANAGEMENT

Travel and expense software company Navan offers a corporate card and an expense management app that reimburses employees' out-of-pocket business travel within 24 to 48 hours. Clients like Unilever, OpenAI, Stubhub, Adobe, Netflix and Zoom pay a subscription fee, which also allows their employees to book flights, hotels and rental cars. Cofounded in 2015 by CEO Ariel Cohen as TripActions, the company rebranded in 2023 to Navan, a mashup of “navigate” and “avant,” as in avant-garde. More recently, acquisitions like U.K. travel agency Reed & Mackay and German business travel company Contravo fueled its growth. In June, Navan confidentially filed for an IPO.

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Shiv Rao

• Company: ABRIDGE
• Title: CEO
• Valuation: $5.3 BILLION
• Type: CLINICAL DOCUMENTATION PLATFORM

Cardiologist Shiv Rao cofounded Abridge in 2018 to free clinicians from the time-sucking paperwork that's required after they see patients. Rather than requiring docs to jot down detailed medical records notes, Abridge records their patient conversations and uses AI to summarize them and fill out health forms. Now used by thousands of clinicians at health systems like John Hopkins Medicine and Mayo Clinic, Abridge announced a $300 million series E funding round in June from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, valuing it at $5.3 billion. Rao’s bet is that better doctors’ notes mean better care: “We're creating a natural incentive for people to communicate better,” he told Forbes last year.

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Eynat Guez

• Company: PAPAYA GLOBAL
• Title: CEO
• Valuation: $3.7 BILLION
• Type: GLOBAL PAYROLL AND PAYMENTS

Cofounded in 2016 by Eynat Guez, the first female CEO to lead a unicorn tech startup in Israel, Papaya Global's automated payroll software is used by more than 1,000 companies in over 160 countries. A 15-year veteran at HR startups, Guez made a bet that technology could pull together finance, HR, payroll, and payments into a single platform to pay out workers around the globe. That vision helped fuel expansion right after the pandemic, as companies were looking for new ways to manage a more distributed labor force. Now the company counts FIFA, Under Armour and Toyota among its customers.

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Bret Taylor

• Company: SIERRA
• Title: CEO
• Valuation: $4.5 BILLION
• Type: CUSTOMER SERVICE SOFTWARE

Sierra is the latest act for its CEO Bret Taylor, the OpenAI board member who was formerly Facebook CTO, Salesforce co-CEO and Twitter chairman. He started the company in 2023 with longtime Google veteran Clay Bavor with the belief that ChatGPT-style conversational AI agents would transform the way businesses interact with their customers. Those include text chats as well as voice agents, who can talk people through flight changes, shopping returns or banking questions. Traction from customers including Sonos and The North Face has helped Taylor and Bavor to raise $285 million from top VC firms Benchmark and Sequoia, reaching a $4.5 billion valuation last fall.

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