The Next Century of Great Companies
Today, Long Lake completed our $6.3 billion acquisition of American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT).
Amex GBT is an iconic global franchise, and the trusted travel partner for 17,500 businesses across 140 countries. Last year alone, Amex GBT booked 35 million trips for more than 10 million travelers. Many of us at Long Lake have been customers for years, and we know what it means to have a partner you can count on when you’re far from home.
This is Long Lake's 40th acquisition. With Amex GBT, our family of companies now employs nearly 30,000 people. We believe the businesses that will compound in the AI era are the ones built on durable foundations: deep customer relationships, trusted brands, and strong supplier partnerships. Amex GBT has all three.
Today marks an important milestone in our mission to empower generational businesses with AI. In partnership with extraordinary founders, leaders, and teams, we believe we can make the next century of these companies even greater than the last.
Why We Built Long Lake
Long Lake is the first AI-native holding company.
Services businesses make up a $70 trillion market, and comprise nearly two-thirds of global GDP. We believe these companies can be among the biggest beneficiaries of AI progress, leveraging the latest models and workflows to make every employee more productive. We also believe that the right way to effectuate this new era is from the inside, alongside the people who already know their customers, industries, and craft better than anyone.
Long Lake offers permanent capital: our plan is to buy, hold, and improve forever. This structure gives us the unique ability to optimize for the very long term. For example, we have not conducted a single layoff across our portfolio – instead, we’ve grown both headcount and topline, together.
At the heart of Long Lake is our world-class AI research and engineering team from OpenAI, Ramp, Palantir, Glean, Google, and more, who build the exact product our companies need. We call it Nexus, the AI platform for knowledge work. Nexus handles the work that’s indispensable to running services companies but sucks up time: answering emails, searching through documents, managing financials. As a result, our companies are able to spend more time solving difficult problems and serving customers. We move faster, customers get better service, and every improvement teaches us something we’re able to bring to the next Long Lake company.
Nexus is built on frontier models, so every advance in AI makes it more capable, and every Long Lake company benefits as soon as it does. Where many businesses see rapid AI progress as a risk, we see it as one of our greatest advantages.
The Future of Travel
Together, we're going to build the next era of travel. We're bringing a world-class AI engineering and research team to millions of existing customer relationships and decades of industry expertise. For Amex GBT's customers, our goal is simple: travel that's easier to book, easier to manage, and better supported at every step.
To the Amex GBT team: welcome. We’re honored to work alongside you, and we can’t wait to build what comes next together.
To the engineers and operators who have been watching AI advance and wondering where they can put it to work in the real world, on problems that matter at real scale: we invite you to come build with us.
Join us
We are a small team taking on one of the largest opportunities of our generation, doing the most important and impactful work of our careers together. If that sounds like you, we're hiring, and I'd love to talk.