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Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, talks about Windows 11 at the Windows 11 launch event that was streamed live on June 24, 2021.

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft’s product chief, Panos Panay, will leave the software and hardware maker, executive vice president Rajesh Jha told employees on Monday.

The shakeup represents a changing of the guard after more than a decade of sales of Microsoft’s Surface PCs, which Panay has presented to consumers at company events. Surface sales have failed to keep up with the growth of cloud services, and Windows, a source of profitable revenue, has yet to return to growth after the pandemic kicked off a buying frenzy.

But the company isn’t giving up on these two areas.

“We remain steadfast and convicted in our strategy and Yusuf Mehdi will take lead on our Windows and Surface businesses and products externally,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. Mehdi, who joined Microsoft in 1992, is Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer.

As part of the changes, Charles Simonyi, who led the development of Microsoft’s popular Word and Excel applications, is joining the management teams for the Experiences and Devices group that Jha is is in charge of, Jha wrote in his memo to employees. Simonyi, now 75, rejoined Microsoft in 2017 as a technical fellow as the company acquired his startup Intentional Software.

“Our commitment to Surface and MR remains unchanged,” Jha wrote, referring to mixed reality, a category that includes Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality devices.

Leadership changes involving Panos’ departure will take effect immediately, just three days before Microsoft holds an event in New York where the company is expected to announce its next generation of Surface devices.

After 10 years on the market, Surface had failed to gain more than a few percentage points of market share in PC shipments, although device designs have inspired other device makers that sell Windows machines. Microsoft picks up revenue from licenses sold to these device makers.

Panay joined Microsoft in 2004 as a group program manager on PC software. He took on additional leadership of Windows, the world’s leading PC operating system, starting in 2020. And since 2021, he has been part of the company’s senior leadership team. He has not yet announced his future plans.

“After 19 incredible years at Microsoft, I’ve decided to turn the page and write the next chapter,” he wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “I’m forever grateful for my time at Microsoft and the amazing people I had the honor to make products with.”

Read the full memo below.

Team, 

After nearly 20 years at the company, Panos Panay has decided to leave Microsoft. Panos has had an incredible impact on our products and culture as well as the broader devices ecosystem. Under Panos’ leadership, the team created the iconic Surface brand with loved products. More recently, as the leader of Windows, the team has brought amazing services and experiences to hundreds of millions with Windows 11 on innovative devices including those from our OEM partners. He will be missed, and I am personally very grateful for his many contributions over the years. Please join me in wishing him well. 

Moving forward, we will double down on our strategy. These changes will be effective immediately with Panos’ help in the transition.  

  • Build silicon, systems and devices that span Windows, client and cloud for an AI world. This team will be led by Pavan Davuluri, who will report directly to me. Brett Ostrum, Nino Storniolo, Linda Averett, Ken Pan, Ralf Groene, Aidan Marcuss, Carlos Picoto, Stevie Bathiche, Robin Seiler, Ruben Caballero and Anuj Gosalia will move to report to Pavan with their teams intact. Windows planning and release management will continue to be in this team. Our commitment to Surface and MR remains unchanged. 
  • Build experiences that blend web, services and Windows for an AI world. To this end, Shilpa Ranganathan, Jeff Johnson and Ali Akgun will directly report to Mikhail Parakhin and form a new Windows and Web Experiences Team, moving with their teams intact.  
  • Yusuf Mehdi will take on the responsibility of leading the Windows and Surface businesses with our OEM and Retail partners. 

In addition, Charles Simonyi, Terri Chudzik and Erin Kolb will join the E+D management teams and Ralf Groene and Mike Davidson will work together on the best alignment on design teams.  

We will set up time for an AMA in the coming days to answer questions. Let’s continue to stay focused on executing on our existing plans. Thank you for all that you do, and the impact that you have for our customers and partners.  

Best, 

Rajesh 

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Navan sets price range for IPO, expects market cap of up to $6.5 billion

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Navan sets price range for IPO, expects market cap of up to .5 billion

FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.

Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP

Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.

The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.

CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”

Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”

Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.

Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.

For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.

Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.

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Tech megacaps lose $770 billion in value as Nasdaq suffers steepest drop since April

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Tech megacaps lose 0 billion in value as Nasdaq suffers steepest drop since April

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.

Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC

Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.

With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.

After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”

Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.

The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Read more CNBC tech news

In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.

OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.

In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.

The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.

“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”

Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.

The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.

Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.

WATCH: Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.

Pres. Trump: Calculating massive increase of tariffs on Chinese products into U.S.

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Govini, a defense tech startup taking on Palantir, hits $100 million in annual recurring revenue

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Govini, a defense tech startup taking on Palantir, hits 0 million in annual recurring revenue

Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.

“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”

CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.

The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.

In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.

The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.

Read more CNBC tech news

Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.

The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.

Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.

“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.

Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.

Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.

While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.

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