Samsara raises $50M to support growth in transportation, logistics management

IoT systems company Samsara announced it has raised $50 million in growth capital from investors Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. The funding comes as Samsara's transportation business is adding more than 1,700 new customers each quarter, the company said, and positions it to scale customer support while investing in new technology innovation.

Samsara offers a data platform for transportation operations that combines GPS tracking, wireless sensors, video, and mobile applications with software that improves efficiency and is designed for intuitive use.

With the new funding, Samsara said it will scale up its customer support and enablement and will expand its platform with new sensors, software, and AI-driven data analytics to bring new business value to its users. The company is planning to grow from 300 employees to more than 550 by the end of the year and noted it will more than double its California-based engineering and customer support teams.

"We've received an enormous volume of product ideas and feedback from our users, and over the past six months we've launched three new product families and dozens of software features," said Sanjit Biswas, co-founder and CEO of Samsara. "This new funding will allow us to accelerate our pace of innovation even further, and to scale our organization to support even more new customers."

Samsara's product development has led to sales growth of more than 250% annually, and new customers are joining the company from across a range of industries including food and beverage distributors, trucking companies, construction firms and school districts.

"Samsara is continually focused on improving the product," said Bill Carragher, CEO of Local Motion, a Boston-based passenger transit company. "Their platform has already made an impact by improving the safety and efficiency of our operations. But we chose it because we knew it would grow to meet our needs."