Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket sold their last company to Cisco for $1.2 billion. Then they went looking for the least digital corner of the economy - the trucks, warehouses and job sites that run the physical world - and wired it up.
In 2012, Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket sold their cloud-networking company, Meraki, to Cisco for about $1.2 billion. It was the kind of exit that lets founders disappear onto a beach. Instead, they went hunting for the least digital business they could find. Not another app for office workers, but the trucks idling at dawn, the excavators parked on job sites, the refrigerated trailers hauling produce across three states. In 2015 they started Samsara to put all of it online.
The bet reads as almost contrarian. While much of the software industry chased advertising, social feeds and office productivity, Samsara aimed at the part of the economy that still ran on clipboards, two-way radios and gut feel - the physical operations that move freight, build roads and keep the lights on. That world is enormous and, until recently, barely instrumented. Samsara's pitch was that a camera, a sensor and a cloud connection on every asset could turn all that guesswork into data, and the data into fewer crashes, less waste and better decisions.
A decade later the loop is paying off. Samsara went public on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2021 under a ticker so on-the-nose it could be a mission statement - IOT - and by fiscal 2026 the company was closing in on $2 billion in annual recurring revenue, growing roughly 30% a year. Below is what it actually does, who pays for it, and why the boring middle of the economy turned out to be one of the more interesting software stories around.
Samsara sells what it calls the Connected Operations Cloud: a combination of rugged IoT hardware and cloud software that gives an operations team a single live view of everything it owns and everyone it employs in the field. A gateway plugs into a vehicle and streams location, engine health, fuel use and driver behavior. An AI dash camera watches the road and the cab. Wireless sensors report the temperature of a reefer trailer or the runtime of a generator. All of it lands in one dashboard, and increasingly, an AI layer sits on top to flag what matters.
The company likes to describe its edge as a stack: hardware devices, cloud connectivity, deep AI and data integrations, working together. That vertical integration is deliberate. Because Samsara makes both the sensor and the software, it controls the quality of the data going in - which is what makes the analysis coming out trustworthy enough to act on.
Samsara's customers are not startups. They are the organizations that keep the country moving: transportation and logistics carriers, construction firms, food and beverage distributors, utilities and energy companies, field-service outfits, manufacturers, wholesale distributors and government agencies. The person on the other end of the software is usually a fleet manager, a safety director or a dispatcher - someone who needs to know, at 5am, where the trucks are and whether they will pass inspection.
From small operators to enterprise giants
The customer base spans small fleets to enterprises running tens of thousands of vehicles. The growth story lately has been at the top end: customers spending more than $100,000 a year with Samsara now account for close to $1 billion of its recurring revenue, up roughly 35% year over year. That is the sound of a product moving from a nice-to-have into the operational backbone of large companies.
Physical operations fail in expensive, physical ways. A distracted driver rear-ends a car and the fleet owner eats a lawsuit. A refrigerated load warms two degrees too far and an entire shipment is condemned. An idle excavator burns diesel doing nothing while a second job site waits for equipment that already exists. A trailer goes missing in a yard the size of a small town. None of these are software problems in the usual sense - they are visibility problems.
This is where the AI dash cam earns its place. It watches for phone use, tailgating and rolling stops, and it beeps in the cab before a mistake becomes a collision. When something does happen, the combination of video, speed and accelerometer data lets a customer reconstruct the incident - often exonerating the driver, refuting fraudulent claims and, over time, lowering insurance costs. A single beep sounds trivial. Multiplied across millions of trips, it becomes a measurable safety program.
The fleet-technology market is crowded. Motive, Geotab, Verizon Connect, Trimble, Lytx and Omnitracs all chase versions of the same buyer. Samsara's differentiation is less about any single feature and more about breadth and integration. Rivals often specialize - one in telematics, another in cameras. Samsara sells telematics, video safety, equipment monitoring, asset tracking, site cameras and workforce apps from one platform, so a customer can start with one and expand into the rest without stitching vendors together.
The founders' history matters here. Biswas and Bicket ran the hardware-plus-cloud-subscription playbook once already at Meraki, and Samsara is that playbook aimed at a far larger, far less digital market. An open API, a developer portal and an app marketplace widen the moat further, letting third parties and OEMs plug directly into the platform.
The platform breaks into a handful of product lines. Vehicle Telematics handles real-time GPS, engine diagnostics, fuel and maintenance and routing. Video-Based Safety covers the AI cameras, in-cab alerts and incident footage. Equipment Monitoring and Asset Tracking extend the same idea to heavy machinery, trailers and unpowered assets, including smart trailers. Site Visibility brings connected cameras and sensors to yards and job sites for remote security and environmental monitoring. Workforce Apps handle dispatch, driver assignment, training and compliance for frontline teams. Tying it together is the open platform, marketplace and developer tooling.
Samsara's economics are a study in patience. The hardware - cameras, gateways, sensors - is essentially a trojan horse. The money is in the multi-year software subscriptions billed per vehicle or per asset, which is why roughly 98% of revenue recurs. Customers land with one product and expand into others, and because the devices become embedded in daily operations, they rarely leave. It is the SaaS flywheel, bolted onto physical infrastructure.
Zoom out and Samsara sits at the intersection of industrial IoT, fleet management and enterprise SaaS - a market that barely existed as a coherent category when the company started. Physical operations account for a huge share of global GDP, and most of it still lacks the kind of real-time data that office software has had for decades. Samsara's position is to be the system of record for that world, the way a CRM is the system of record for sales.
There are risks. The market is competitive, hardware carries costs and support burdens that pure-software firms avoid, and a slowdown in freight or construction ripples straight through the customer base. But the direction of travel is clear: the trucks, trailers, machines and workers that move the physical world are getting connected, and Samsara has spent a decade building the platform they connect to.
It started with a fridge, not a truck
One detail captures the whole company. Samsara did not begin with fleets at all. Its first product was the simplest cloud-connected device the founders could imagine - a temperature sensor - aimed at food, beverage and pharma customers worried about spoilage. It was the feedback from those early users that pointed the company toward vehicle tracking. The willingness to follow the customer rather than the original plan is arguably why Samsara exists in its current form.
It sells the Connected Operations Cloud - IoT hardware such as AI dash cams and vehicle gateways, plus cloud software - to help organizations track, secure and optimize their vehicles, equipment, sites and workers.
Sanjit Biswas (CEO) and John Bicket (CTO) founded it in 2015. The pair had previously built Meraki and sold it to Cisco for about $1.2 billion in 2012.
Yes. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2021 under the ticker IOT, raising roughly $805 million.
Fleets and physical-operations organizations across transportation and logistics, construction, utilities and energy, food and beverage, field services, manufacturing, retail distribution and government.
Through recurring, multi-year software subscriptions billed per vehicle or asset alongside its hardware, with about 98% of revenue recurring and ARR approaching $2 billion.