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From left, Parker Conrad, co-founder and CEO of Rippling, and Kleiner Perkins investor Ilya Fushman speak at the venture firm’s Fellows Founders Summit in San Francisco in September 2022.

Rippling

Human resources software startup Rippling said Friday that its valuation has swelled to $16.8 billion in its latest fundraising round.

The company raised $450 million in the round, and has committed to buying an additional $200 million worth of shares from current and previous employees. The company’s valuation is up from $13.5 billion in a round a year ago.

Rippling said there was no lead investor. Baillie Gifford, Elad Gil, Goldman Sachs Growth and others participated in the round, according to a statement from the San Francisco-based company.

With the tech IPO market mostly dormant over the past three-plus years, and President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on imports leading several companies to delay planned offerings, the most high-profile late-stage tech startups continue to tap private markets for growth capital. Rippling co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad told CNBC in an interview the the company isn’t planning for an IPO in the near future.

Conrad also highlighted a change that’s taken place in public markets in recent years, since inflation began soaring in late 2021, followed by higher interest rates. With concerns about the economy swirling, many tech companies downsized and took other steps toward generating and preserving cash.

“It does look a lot like, in order to be successful in the public markets, your growth rates have to come down so that you can be profitable,” said Conrad, who avoided enacting layoffs. “And so for us, that sort of pushes things out until the company looks profitable and probably slower growing, right?”

At Rippling, annual revenue growth is well over 30%, Conrad said, though he didn’t provide an updated sales figure. The information reported last year that Rippling doubled annual recurring revenue to over $350 million by the end of 2023 from a year prior.

Given the pace of expansion, Conrad said he isn’t fixated on profits at the moment at Rippling, which ranked 14th on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list.

Rippling offers payroll services, device management and corporate credit cards, among other products. Competitors include ADP, Paychex, Paycom Software and Paylocity.

There’s also privately held Deel, which Rippling sued in March for allegedly deploying a spy who collected confidential information. Conrad suggested that the publicity surrounding the case may be boosting business.

“I think it’s too early to say, looking at the data, how all of this is going to evolve from a market perspective, but certainly we see some companies that have said, ‘Hey, we’re talking to Rippling because of this,'” Conrad said.

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Navan, corporate travel and expense startup, files for initial public offering

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Navan, corporate travel and expense startup, files for initial public offering

By year-end there should be around 20 tech IPOS, says Barclays' Kristin DeClark

Navan, the business travel, payments, and expense management startup, filed on Friday afternoon to go public.

Its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that the company plans to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “NAVN.”

Navan reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million (up 32%) across over 10,000 customers, and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (up 34%), according to the S-1 filing.

Goldman Sachs and Citigroup will act as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering.

Navan ranked No. 39 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, and also made the 2024 list.

The IPO market has bounced back this year, with deal activity up 56% across 156 deals (roughly 200 IPO filings in all) and $30 billion in proceeds, up over 23% year over year, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital. It has been the best year for IPOs since 2021, though still far below the Covid offering boom years, when over $142 billion (2021) and $78 billion (2020) was raised by IPOs.

This year’s deal flow has been highlighted by hot AI names like Coreweave, as well as some of the startup world’s most highly valued firms from the past decade, such as fintech Klarna and design firm Figma, crypto companies Circle, Bullish and Gemini, and some long-awaited IPO candidates finally hitting the market, such as Stubhub this week, though its shares have slumped since the first day of trading. Top Amazon reseller Pattern went public on Friday.

Other startups are expected to pursue deals given the increased investor appetite.

The Renaissance IPO ETF is up 20% this year.

Launched by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig in 2015, Navan set out to disrupt a business travel sector where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.

The Palo Alto-based company, formerly called TripActions, refers to itself as an “all-in-one super app” for corporate travel and expenses.

Customers include Unilever, Adobe, Christie’s, Blue Origin and Geico.

It has also been pushing further into AI, with a virtual assistant named Ava handling approximately 50% of user interactions during the six months ended July 31, according to the filing, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition supporting its platform, as well as proprietary cloud infrastructure.

“We built Navan for the road warriors, for CEOs and CFOs who understand travel’s critical importance to their strategy, the finance teams who demand precision and control, the executive assistants juggling itineraries, and the program admins ensuring seamless events,” the co-founders wrote in an IPO filing letter.

“We saw firsthand the frustration of clunky, outdated systems. Travelers were forced to cobble together solutions, wait for hours on hold to book or change travel, and negotiate with travel agents. They struggled to adhere to company policies, with little visibility into those policies, and after all that, they spent even more time on tedious expense reports after a trip. We felt the pain of finance teams struggling to gain visibility into fragmented travel spending and to enforce policies, and the frustration of suppliers unable to connect directly with the high-value business travelers they sought to serve,” they wrote in the filing.

Revenue grew 33% year-over-year from $402 million in fiscal 2024 to $537 million in fiscal 2025, according to the S-1 filing. The company reported a net loss that decreased 45% year-over-year from $332 million in fiscal 2024 to $181 million in fiscal 2025. Gross margin improved from 60% in fiscal 2024 to 68% in fiscal 2025.

The business travel and expense space is crowded, with fellow Disruptors Ramp and Brex, and TravelPerk, as well as incumbents like SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel.

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Microsoft raises Xbox prices in U.S. due to economic environment

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Microsoft raises Xbox prices in U.S. due to economic environment

A gamer plays soccer title Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 on an Xbox console.

Sezgin Pancar | Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Microsoft said on Friday that it will increase the recommended retail price of several Xbox consoles in the U.S. starting in October because of “changes in the macroeconomic environment.”

The company said it would not increase prices for accessories such as controllers and headsets, and that prices in other countries would stay the same.

While Microsoft didn’t explicitly attribute the increase to the Trump administration’s tariffs, many consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way. President Donald Trump has issued tariffs this year on multiple countries with a stated goal to bring more manufacturing to the U.S.

“We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration,” Microsoft said on its website.

It’s the second time Microsoft has raised prices on its consoles in the U.S. this year. Rivals Sony and Nintendo have also raised console prices in the U.S. as Trump’s tariffs went into effect.

Here are the changes, according to a PDF posted on Microsoft’s website:

  • Xbox Series S will start at $399, up from $379 previously. A version with 1TB of storage costs $449.
  • Xbox Series X Digital console now costs $599, a $50 increase. The Xbox Series X with a disc drive also got a $50 increase to $649.
  • The most expensive version, with 2TB of storage, costs $799, up from $729.

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StubHub’s stock plunges 10% in third day on NYSE as post-IPO slump deepens

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StubHub's stock plunges 10% in third day on NYSE as post-IPO slump deepens

Ticket reseller StubHub signage on display at the New York Stock Exchange for the company’s IPO on Sept. 17, 2025.

NYSE

After a long wait to get public, StubHub has had a rough start to life on the New York Stock Exchange.

Shares of the online ticket vendor dropped 10% on Friday, falling for a third straight day since debuting on Wednesday. At $18.46, the stock is now down 21% from its IPO price of $23.50.

StubHub, trading under ticker symbol “STUB,” has lagged behind fellow market newcomers like online lender Klarna, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle, which delivered early returns for investors following their recent IPOs. Shares of cybersecurity firm Netskope also rose 10% on Friday in their second trading day, after an initial pop on Thursday.

StubHub had been trying to go public for the past several years, but delayed its debut twice. The most recent stall came in April after President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs roiled markets. The company filed an updated prospectus in August, effectively restarting the process to go public, and has since seen its market cap slip to about $6.8 billion from $8.6 billion at its IPO.

Founded in 2000, StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. In the first quarter, revenue rose 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. The company’s net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.

StubHub CEO Eric Baker told CNBC on Wednesday that the company expects recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing to cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.

Regulators are zeroing in on online ticket sellers over their pricing mechanisms and whether the companies are doing enough to keep automated purchasing bots in check. The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued StubHub rival Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, accusing it of illegal resale tactics.

While StubHub has failed to excite Wall Street, its struggles haven’t seeped into other deals as the tech IPO market continues to show signs of a resurgence after an extended dry spell. Amazon reseller Pattern Group saw its stock rise 12% on Friday, though shares initially slipped 6%.

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