Samsara's founders had done this once before. Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket started Meraki, which ran office Wi-Fi from the cloud, and sold it to Cisco in 2012. Then they turned to trucks, forklifts, and pipelines. Samsara's devices sat in vehicles and machines and sent data to a cloud dashboard: where a truck was, how it was driven, when a motor ran hot. When Samsara went public in December 2021, supply chains were snarled and every fleet wanted to know where its goods were.

Meraki for the Physical World

Biswas and Bicket founded Samsara in San Francisco in 2015. The industries that move and make things, such as trucking, construction, and utilities, still ran on paper logs and old radios. Samsara's bet was that cheap sensors and cloud software could give those companies the same live view that office IT already had. It sold the hardware and charged a yearly subscription for the software. Its products included dash cameras, vehicle trackers, and sensors for industrial machines.

Ticker IOT

Samsara priced its shares at $23 on December 14, 2021, and raised $805 million. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker IOT, short for Internet of Things. The stock rose about 7 percent on its first day. Growth stayed strong as more fleets signed up. Samsara passed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in December 2023. It still trades on the NYSE under IOT.

Cover: On the Yoshida Highway, Sugimura Jihei. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for travelers on a highway (fleets on the road).