Case study: How Navan used Muck Rack to monitor global coverage during its IPO and beyond

Overview

Navan is the leading all-in-one business travel, payments and expense management platform that makes travel easy for frequent travelers. From finding flights and hotels to automating expense reconciliation—with 24/7 support along the way—Navan delivers an intuitive experience travelers love and finance teams rely on.

Marissa Levine, the corporate communications manager at Navan, supports external communications across product, enterprise, and leadership initiatives. When she joined the team in May 2025, she championed the team’s switch to Muck Rack.

She’s personally relied on Muck Rack for more than six years—since the start of her PR career—and knew firsthand its media database and user experience were unmatched.

“The technology Muck Rack has built is very simple and streamlined and helps us pull the best possible results very quickly,” she says.

The challenge

A key focus for Navan's communications team is to engage a wide audience, including current users and prospective customers across industries.

“Especially for PR, we’re trying to communicate how Navan makes travel and expense easier for every frequent traveler,” Marissa says.

When she joined in May 2025, the team was still relatively new, giving her the opportunity to help set up processes, structure and tech. At the time, Navan was using another PR software, but it wasn’t meeting their needs.

“It was more difficult to pull results, some media emails weren’t in the database, and it just wasn’t capturing all the coverage or giving us a true sense of how we were tracking against our goals,” Marissa says.

The solution

Having already used Muck Rack throughout her entire PR career, Marissa immediately knew it was the right fit for her team at Navan.

Onboarding was smooth, helped by the fact that several team members had used Muck Rack previously. Their dedicated onboarding specialist, Michael, was hands-on, patient and continued checking in even after onboarding wrapped.

According to Michael, the Navan team has quickly become a model example of how to strategically adopt Muck Rack to improve their day-to-day workflows.

How Muck Rack helps Navan track global media coverage, build reports and connect with journalists

Muck Rack has become central to Navan’s communications efforts—from surfacing global coverage in real time to helping the team build data-rich reports for executives.

Tracking company coverage (and filtering out local news in Ireland)

Navan’s global presence makes accurate coverage tracking essential. But historically, automated alerts generated too much irrelevant noise—including unrelated local stories out of Navan, Ireland.

Working with Michael, Marissa’s team has set up multiple Boolean searches and Alerts to capture only the coverage that is relevant.

“Since we’ve moved to Muck Rack, we rarely see any coverage come through that isn’t about our brand,” she says. “We have everything set up to where we can’t miss anything.”

Each team member receives email Alerts, and a Slack integration pings key stakeholders in the team’s Slack workspace instantly with any new mentions. Each Alert contains a link to the source, making it easy to review and take any necessary next steps.

Navan also has a second Slack integration dedicated to wider industry news, including competitors. This helps the team keep a pulse on the industry, including new announcements from their competitors and what journalists are reporting on.

Building media reports to share with executives—and drive strategy

Navan uses Muck Rack to automatically generate quarterly internal communications reports, plus ad-hoc reports for major moments like product launches or leadership announcements.

“Reporting is a big one for us,” Marissa says. “We needed Muck Rack because, as you can imagine, there’s loads of coverage that comes in each quarter, and to track that manually is nearly impossible and would take us hours to review.”

The reports help executives understand how Navan is performing against goals and the T&E industry. They also help the communications team identify target outlets, refine messaging and set benchmarks for the coming quarter or year.

When there’s a big announcement—like when the company went public in October—Marissa’s team pulled daily Muck Rack reports to understand how the IPO was being represented across outlets.

“It wouldn’t have been possible without Muck Rack,” she says. “We relied on those reports to give us an accurate sense of how we were tracking.”

Real-time Alerts also notified the team when major outlets, including Bloomberg, Axios and Semafor, published coverage.

Navan also uses a Muck Rack Dashboard to regularly track share of voice.

“It’s really helpful to see how we’re stacking up against our competitors and identify key differentiators we can focus on more in the future,” Marissa says.

Fostering new media relationships

Building new relationships with reporters is an important part of Marissa’s role—and Muck Rack is her primary tool for finding the right journalists, reviewing their recent work and gathering their contact information.

“I don’t know what I’d do without Muck Rack’s media database,” she says. “That’s where I get every email address from. It’s very, very rare that I can't find one.”

She values how quickly Muck Rack updates journalists’ profiles—in what feels like real time—especially as more and more reporters and writers move to new beats or publications.

Final thoughts on Muck Rack from Marissa Levine

Without Muck Rack, Marissa believes her role would be significantly more stressful and time-consuming. She appreciates that Muck Rack adds clarity and data to her team’s work—critical at a company that runs on data.

“Muck Rack has been a big game-changer for our comms team,” she says.

“Not just here at Navan but also other places I’ve worked. It’s a great platform, and it really helps our team pull accurate results and show the entire company the great work we’re doing.”