From Negative Revenue to Nasdaq: Michael Riegel, Navan | Growth Decoded by Manoj (EP#588)
November 12, 2026
Co-produced by
Co-produced by
07:14 – What Rocket Internet Taught Him About Speed
19:44 – Why the Right Market Matters More Than the Model
30:31 – When COVID Turned Revenue Negative
45:04 – Selling to Navan and Staying On
This episode is part of Growth Decoded, a format by Manoj Harasgama on the Swisspreneur Show and the podcast companion to our Scale-up Circle, Swisspreneur’s community and event series for founders who are scaling.
Manoj is a British-Swiss serial growth founder who has built, scaled and exited companies across marketplaces, SaaS and DeepTech, including Treatwell, JOIN.com and Crosstown. Today, he is Founder and CEO of Ventourage.
In each episode, Manoj sits down with a founder who has scaled internationally from Europe to decode the key growth decisions behind their journey.
Episode description:
Michael Riegel is Chief Customer Officer at Navan, the travel and expense management platform that listed on Nasdaq in October 2025. In 2015 he co-founded Comtravo in Berlin, an early bet on AI to take the pain out of business travel. Comtravo raised more than €40 million from investors including Creandum, Project A and Microsoft’s M12 and won over 2,000 business customers. Navan, then called TripActions, acquired it in 2022. Michael went on to lead Navan across Europe, the Middle East and Africa before taking on his current global role.
In this episode, Michael looks back at what Rocket Internet and the Bay Area taught him about speed and ambition, and why he came back to Germany to build. He explains how his frustration with business travel at Homejoy led to Comtravo’s first product, a text-based booking service. The team then pivoted to a full travel platform once it became clear the technology couldn’t automate enough for the unit economics to work. His takeaway: with the right market and a strong team, you can pivot your way to the right model.
The conversation then turns to the hardest moment of the journey. Weeks after Comtravo completed its €30 million Series B in January 2020, COVID hit: cancellations outnumbered bookings, and revenue went negative as refunds poured out. Michael explains why the company let its sales team go and bought eight or nine distressed travel agencies instead, coming out of the pandemic with several times its pre-COVID booking volume. He also shares why cultural and strategic fit decided the sale to TripActions, what really changes the day after an IPO, and why, looking back, he would have pivoted even faster.
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