Long Lake

Long Lake is a holding company that buys established American services businesses and rebuilds their operations around AI, using an in-house platform called Nexus that connects models to company data and day-to-day workflows. Today's launch marks the close of its $6.3 billion take-private of American Express Global Business Travel, the corporate travel manager that serves roughly 17,500 business clients across 140 countries and booked around 35 million trips last year. Amex GBT will delist from the NYSE and operate as a private company under Long Lake, with backing from General Catalyst and Alpha Wave on the transaction. The deal matters because it is the largest test yet of the "AI roll-up" thesis, taking a 111-year-old category leader off the public markets to retool it with applied AI rather than selling software to it from the outside. Long Lake's pitch to operators is ownership plus engineering, with its team embedding alongside employees to map workflows, clean data, and ship tools into production. In adjacent portfolio work, Nexus has been used for tasks like payroll exception handling, where the stated goal is making each worker meaningfully more productive rather than cutting headcount. Long Lake was founded in 2023 by CEO Alex Taubman and co-founder Zach Frankel, and operates from New York, San Francisco, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. For founders and investors watching the frontier-AI-meets-services space, this launch is a concrete data point on what an AI holding company looks like at scale, and on how patient capital plans to apply models to industries that software alone has struggled to move.