A useful way to read Jim DiSanto’s career is as a sequence of shrinking distances. First, the distance between a person and a place. Then the distance between a field worker and a company database. Later, the distance between a vehicle and the network, between a university laboratory and a customer, between a promising machine and a business that can survive. The job titles changed from founder to executive to investor. The object of attention stayed in motion.
DiSanto trained in two engineering disciplines at the University of Michigan: aerospace and computer engineering. One studies machines that must perform in an unforgiving physical environment. The other studies the logic that controls them. He later earned an MBA at Stanford, from 1990 to 1992, adding the commercial language that would recur through the rest of his work.
That combination arrived at an opportune moment. The web was becoming useful, but it was not yet local. Searching for a business near an address, drawing a route, or attaching geographic meaning to a web page required infrastructure that users now barely notice. DiSanto co-founded Vicinity Corporation in the mid-1990s and worked in sales and business development. Vicinity became one of the early web location-services companies, went public in 2000, and was purchased by Microsoft in 2002 for its MapPoint business.
When the map left the browser
The next frontier was not a prettier map. It was a map connected to work. At Simplexity Wireless, where DiSanto served as vice president of business and corporate development and as a director from 1999 to 2003, the problem was the emerging wireless market. At KonaWare, the company he co-founded and led as chairman and CEO, it became concrete: transportation, logistics and supply-chain operations carried out by people beyond the office walls.
In a 2002 conversation about KonaWare, DiSanto described what the company called a third generation of mobile applications. The premise was that new networks and technical components could finally support mission-critical software for workers in the field. He was candid about the weak point. The 2.5G infrastructure of the moment was still “fairly precarious.” That small phrase catches the reality of building early. The application may be ready while the world it depends on is not.
“In the past, we haven’t had the infrastructure pieces in place, and because of that you couldn’t get anything done.”
Jim DiSanto, speaking about enterprise mobile software in 2002
KonaWare supplied software for fleets and mobile workers, a market where elegance is subordinate to uptime. A dispatcher, driver or service operator cannot pause the shift because the network becomes temperamental. The company worked with routing and dispatch specialist Ortec to combine pickup-and-delivery functions with route optimization. The business case was plain: visibility at the edge of an enterprise, lower operating costs and better dispatch.
There was geography in the business strategy, too. While DiSanto worked from Menlo Park, KonaWare established an office in Harrison, Arkansas, close to the large freight and retail operations clustered in the region. In 2006, he and a colleague argued that Northwest Arkansas could support a larger logistics-technology workforce. It was an operator’s view of a technology cluster: talent grows near the customers whose problems give the software a reason to exist.
The Beijing turn
KonaWare was sold to Yamei Electronics of Beijing in 2009. DiSanto joined Yamei as a board director and general manager, forming partnerships with automakers and Tier 1 suppliers. The shift makes sense in retrospect. Logistics software had brought him to the moving edge of the enterprise. Automotive electronics brought him inside the machine itself.
Yamei was acquired by Trimble Navigation in 2011. By then, DiSanto’s working network stretched across software, telecommunications, fleet management, auto manufacturers, suppliers, industrial companies and research groups. This was more than a list of contacts. Each group spoke a different language and ran on a different clock. Software teams shipped in weeks. Automotive programs could take years. University research moved by discovery. Industrial buyers moved by validation, procurement and risk.
After a period as an entrepreneur in residence at Asset Management Ventures, he co-founded Motus Ventures in 2012. The firm’s early identity centered on transportation technology, smart infrastructure and the Internet of Things. Its present website frames the mandate as artificial intelligence, climate tech and deep tech. The category widened, but the difficult middle remained: technical systems that meet the physical world and large organizations.
Co-founds Vicinity, bringing place and local search to the early web.
Joins Simplexity Wireless in business development and board roles.
Begins his documented tenure as KonaWare chairman and CEO.
Moves into board and general-management work at Yamei in Beijing.
Co-founds Motus Ventures and starts investing from the operator’s side of the table.
Motus announces a second Smart World Innovation Fund and an expanded climate-tech effort.
An engineer’s version of venture capital
DiSanto has served as a board member, observer or advisor to companies including Waze, Autotalks, Quanergy, Doorman, Metawave and Argus Cyber Security. The list spans navigation, connected-vehicle communications, lidar, delivery, radar and cybersecurity. Each company occupies a layer in the same broader stack: machines sensing where they are, communicating what they know and acting with less human intervention.
His public comments tend to describe a deployment path. Discussing Auro Robotics in 2016, he called private campuses an “ideal springboard” toward fully automated vehicles. The attraction is practical. A campus offers bounded roads, repeated routes and a manageable environment. It gives an ambitious system somewhere specific to learn before it confronts the open road.
The same logic appeared in his comments on Sensibo, a company that connects air conditioners and appliances. He described the product as a building block that could turn an existing appliance into a smart device. Again, the wedge was narrow and the consequence wider: connect the installed machine, collect useful data, improve service and give the manufacturer an ongoing relationship with the customer.
Choose a bounded environment where a difficult system can prove reliability before it expands.
Translate a technical capability into a workflow, a cost reduction or a decision a customer can use.
Ask whether the networks, suppliers and standards beneath the product are finally ready.
Pair laboratory invention with industrial partners that understand viability and adoption.
Motus describes itself as a team of engineers and executives who have built technology companies from inception to the public markets. It also highlights work turning university research into companies and relationships with industrial limited partners. Those details explain the firm’s role in the ecosystem. A laboratory can demonstrate what is possible. A corporate partner can identify what is useful. An early-stage investor tries to determine whether one can become the other before the money and patience run out.
From movement to energy
Climate technology may look like a departure from maps and mobility. In DiSanto’s arc, it feels more like the next layer down. Transportation is an energy system. Data centers are energy systems. Factories, batteries, motors and hydrogen production all turn physical constraints into economic ones. Motus now presents AI, climate tech and deep tech as its three core areas, with portfolio interests that include robotics, electrification, battery technology and green hydrogen.
In 2023, the firm announced the initial closing of its second Smart World Innovation Fund and expanded collaborations with the Clean Technology Institute and the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine. DiSanto said top research institutions could provide a “wellspring of ideas and technologies” for large human problems. His emphasis also landed on industrial partners, whose needs help reveal which inventions may become viable products.
Later that year he published a Motus essay titled “Ammonia is the New Oil.” In September 2024, he helped lead discussion at a Menlo Park review of technologies intended to reduce the carbon footprint of data centers. The specific subjects had moved from vehicle radar and route optimization to cooling, energy management and lower-carbon materials. The method remained recognizable: gather technical founders, researchers and companies around infrastructure with a measurable operational problem.
“Scientists at top research institutions can offer a wellspring of ideas and technologies to solve humanity’s biggest challenges.”
Jim DiSanto, on Motus Ventures’ climate-tech partnerships
There is a temptation to tell a technology career as a procession of predictions that came true. DiSanto’s record suggests something more useful. Categories arrive late. The work begins earlier, when networks are precarious, markets are awkward and a customer still needs the new thing translated into an old budget. Progress depends on noticing not only what has become possible, but what has become dependable.
That is the connective tissue from Vicinity to KonaWare to Yamei to Motus. A location service becomes a map people can use. A wireless network becomes a tool a driver can trust. A sensor becomes a safer or more efficient machine. Research becomes a company. In each case, the future earns its place by doing a job in the present.