Long Lake Management has completed its $6.3 billion
acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel, taking the travel
management company private and paving the way for "heavy" investment
in AI deployment across Amex GBT, the companies announced.
The acquisition, first
announced in May and approved by Amex GBT shareholders on Aug. 3, brought
shareholders $9.50 per share, more than a 65 percent premium over its
volume-weighted average price in the 30 days following the merger agreement.
Amex GBT shares now have ceased trading and are delisted from the New York
Stock Exchange.
Amex GBT is the latest—the 35th, to be exact—in a long line
of acquisitions for Long Lake, a
permanent-capital holding company that focuses on transforming its
acquisitions with applied AI, but the Amex GBT deal is its largest to date and
"the world's first AI take-private deal," according to Amex GBT. In a
post on LinkedIn, Long Lake co-founder and CEO Alex Taubman said the focus now
is "preparing Amex GBT's technology platform for the agentic travel
management era."
At the heart of that transformation is Long Lake's Nexus, a
self-learning AI platform that maps workflows and cleans up data for
integration. Amex GBT said it performs as much as five times better over AI
models built for general purposes.
"Long Lake acquires generational companies and holds
them for the long term," according to Taubman. "Our engineers embed
with the team to deploy Nexus, our AI platform for knowledge work. Across our
portfolio, the average employee using Nexus saves 8.3 hours per week."
Taubman also noted that Long Lake is currently in hiring
mode for researchers and engineers in New York and San Francisco.
For Amex GBT customers, the TMC said that account teams,
contracts and service will "carry on without interruption" following
the acquisition as the AI investment and integration occurs "behind the
scenes," according to the TMC. "From agentic customer tools to
Al-empowered travel counselors, our customers can expect continuous innovation
that will make the service they already trust faster, smarter and more
personalized," Amex GBT CEO Paul Abbott said in a statement.
Long Lake said the acquisition was financed by a combination
of its existing investors along with Koch's investment and acquisition arm Koch
Equity Development. Investors for Long Lake, which was founded in 2023, include
General Catalyst, Alpha Wave, Elad Gil, D1 and Thrive.