The boss of travel and expense management platform Navan told CNBC he’s preparing the company to get its business into shape for an eventual initial public offering this year, in another sign leaders of privately-held startups are getting more optimistic about their prospects in the public markets.

Asked about when Navan would choose to go public, the firm’s CEO and co-founder Ariel Cohen said the company is close to reaching that milestone. “We can see the signals,” he said, adding that Navan has been adjusting its leadership structure and making changes to its board in a signal of maturity.

Last month saw Navan announce the return of Rich Liu, formerly Navan’s chief revenue officer and “an expert on scaling companies from seed to IPO and beyond,” to the business as CEO of Navan Travel, the company’s travel division.

Amy Butte, the former chief financial officer of the New York Stock Exchange who oversaw the U.S. exchange operator’s transition to a public company in 2006, was also appointed to Navan’s board of directors as audit committee chair.

“I don’t want to give a date,” Cohen told CNBC, adding that he’s not even told his own family a date for when he expects Navan to go public — let alone his board and Navan employees. “At the end of the day, there are things that are out of my control.”

“The market can collapse. There are elections in the U.S. There are wars. So I never actually promise things to people if I don’t know that the delivery is in my control,” he added.

While Cohen wouldn’t commit to a date for Navan’s eventual IPO, he said the business was “not far” from being ready for a stock market listing. The company is on track to become cash-flow positive and achieve profitability for the first time this year, he said.

“The timing will need to include several things,” he said. “Today, in this market, to be public, you need to be profitable. We are not far from that, but we are not there. We’re going to be there this year. And it’s not easy to do it while you’re growing fast.”

Cohen said he’s also keeping a wary eye on the market — but added that although, previously, investors would have seen a company like his as dependent on buoyant market sentiment surrounding technology, today he sees the firm as “mature enough” to go public independent of the market backdrop.

Navan is now growing revenues by around 40% on average, according to Cohen, with the company’s fintech business seeing faster growth (100%) than its travel business (30%).

Founded in 2015 as TripActions, Navan began life as a travel management platform for businesses, seeking to provide a smoother experience to travel agents and incumbent players like American Express, BCD Travel, and SAP Concur. The company counts the likes of Unilever and Christie’s as clients.

The firm subsequently expanded into expensing and payments with solutions for automating linking credit cards to a single platform and automating expenses.

Navan is backed by major investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Goldman Sachs, and Lightspeed. Navan has raised more than $1.5 billion in venture funding to date and was last valued at $9.2 billion. It competes with Spanish startup TravelPerk, which was most recently valued at $1.4 billion.

Navan introduced a big evolution of that product last year with the arrival of Navan Connect, a new expensing product.

Most corporate card startups, like Brex and Ramp, offer users their own branded corporate smart cards. But Navan’s Connect feature, which it’s rolled out in partnership with Citi, lets businesses offer automated expense management and reconciliation without having to change corporate card provider.

Like other tech firms, Navan has been making a big investment into artificial intelligence. The company rolled out its own AI personal assistant, called Ava, last year. The tool uses generative AI to help travelers, travel admins, and finance managers make travel plans and budget effectively.

Ava — which stands for automated virtual assistant — now processes around 150,000 monthly chats, more than 35% of which are managed to completion as of April 2024, according to Navan.

Cohen said Navan is planning to roll out an even more personalized version of Ava’s AI assistant, which can generate travel plans for someone based on their past behavior, to even greater accuracy in six months’ time.

Navan was named on the 2024 edition of CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list.

Elon Musk has launched SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet services in Indonesia as the Southeast Asian nation seeks to boost internet connectivity in remote areas.

The inauguration took place at a community health center in Bali on Sunday, with the SpaceX founder telling local media he was “very excited” to bring internet services to areas with limited or no connectivity and that internet connectivity can be “a life-saver to remote medical clinics.”

“It is really important to emphasize the importance of internet connectivity and how much of a life-changer and a life-saver it can be,” Musk told local media on Sunday.

SpaceX, which manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft, is also a developer of Starlink satellites which provide internet connectivity to remote locations. Starlink is already available in Southeast Asia in Malaysia and the Philippines.

Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago with more than 17,000 islands, faces an urban-rural connectivity divide where millions of people living in rural areas have limited or no access to internet services.

Communication and Informatics Minister Budi Arie Setiadi previously said Starlink would help Indonesia extend internet access to regions not covered by local internet providers, according to Indonesian news agency Antara.

The minister also tried to dispel concerns that Starlink’s entry would hurt local internet providers.

“When you have access to the internet, you can learn anything,” said Musk, who is also the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla. “But if you don’t have internet connectivity, it is very difficult to learn.”

“And if you have goods and services you wish to sell to the world, and even if you are in a remote village, you can now do so with internet connection. So you can bring a lot of prosperity to [remote] communities,” said Musk.

When asked about whether he has plans to invest in Indonesia’s electric vehicle sector as well, Musk said he was focused on Starlink first.

“It’s very likely that my companies will invest in Indonesia,” said Musk.

Indonesia minister Luhut Pandjaitan said Musk is considering to set up an EV battery plant in the country, after the tech leader met with President Joko Widodo on Monday, according to Reuters.

Microsoft‘s Build developer conference kicks off on Tuesday, giving the company the opportunity to showcase its latest artificial intelligence projects, following high-profile events this month hosted by OpenAI and Google.

One area where Microsoft has a distinct advantage over others in the AI race is in its ownership of Windows, which gives the company a massive PC userbase.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that 2024 will mark the year when AI will become the “first-class part of every PC.”

The company already offers its Copilot chatbot assistant in the Bing search engine and, for a fee, in Office productivity software. Now, PC users will get to hear more about how AI will be embedded in Windows and what they can do with it on new AI PCs.

Build comes days after Google I/O, where the search giant unveiled its most powerful AI model yet and showed how its Gemini AI will work on computers and phones. Prior to Google’s event, OpenAI announced its new GPT-4o model. Microsoft is OpenAI’s lead investor, and its Copilot technology is based on OpenAI’s models..

For Microsoft, the challenge is twofold: keeping a prominent position in AI and bolstering PC sales, which have been in the doldrums for the past two years following an upgrade cycle during the pandemic.

In a recent note on Dell to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote that he remains “bullish on the PC market recovery” due to commentary from customers and recent “upward revisions to notebook” original design manufacturer (ODM) builds.

Technology industry researcher Gartner estimated that PC shipments increased 0.9% in the quarter after a multi-year slump. Demand for PCs was “slightly better than expected,” Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the company’s quarterly earnings call last month.

New AI tools from Microsoft could offer another reason for enterprise and consumer customers to upgrade their aging computers, whether they’re made by HP, Dell or Lenovo.

“While Copilot for Windows does not directly drive monetization it should, we believe, drive up usage of Windows, stickiness of Windows, customers to higher priced more powerful PCs (and therefore more revenue to Microsoft per device), and likely search revenue,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a note to investors on April 26, the day after Microsoft reported earnings.

While Microsoft will provide the software to handle some of the AI tasks sent to the internet, its computers will be powered by chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm for offline AI jobs. That could include, for example, using your voice to ask Copilot to summarize a transcription without a connection.

The key hardware addition to an AI PC is what’s called a neural processing unit. NPUs go beyond the capabilities of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and are designed to specifically handle artificial intelligence tasks. Traditionally, they’ve been used by companies like Apple to improve photos and videos or for speech recognition.

Microsoft hasn’t said what AI PCs will be capable of yet without an internet connection. But Google’s PIxel 8 Pro phone, which doesn’t have a full computer processor, can summarize and transcribe recordings, recommend text message responses and more using its Gemini Nano AI.

Computers with Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chips with a dedicated NPU are expected to arrive in late 2024. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip with an NPU will be available in the middle of this year, while AMD’s latest Ryzen Pro is expected sometime during the quarter.

Intel says the chips allow for things like “real-time language translation, automation inferencing, and enhanced gaming environments.”

Apple has been using NPUs for years and recently highlighted them in its new M4 chip for the iPad Pro. The M4 chip is expected to launch in the next round of Macs sometime this year.

Qualcomm, unlike Intel and AMD, offers chips powered by Arm-based architecture. One of Microsoft’s sessions will talk about “the Next Generation of Windows on Arm,” which will likely cover how Windows runs on Qualcomm chips and how that’s different from Intel and AMD versions of Windows.

Intel still controls 78% of the PC chip market, followed by AMD at 13%, according to recent data from Canalys.

In the past, Qualcomm has promoted Snapdragon Arm-based computers by touting their longer battery life, thinner designs and other benefits like cellular connections. But earlier versions of Qualcomm’s chips were limited in what they offered consumers. In 2018, for example, the company’s Snapdragon 835 chip couldn’t run most Windows applications. 

Microsoft has since improved Windows to handle traditional apps on Arm, but questions remain. The company even has an FAQ page dedicated to computers running on ARM hardware. 

WATCH: Investing in the future of AI