Samsara is a SaaS company that gets 98% of its revenue from subscriptions to its Connected Operations Cloud. They count 13,000 customers with ARR >$5000. Samsara is founder-led.
Samsara recently filed their S-1 statement with the SEC, indicating that they will go public in a few weeks.
What Samsara does
Samsara customers have commercial fleets of vehicles. Customers use Samsara to streamline their operations and cut costs in various ways:
A freight carrier (trucking) reduces vehicle idle time to save fuel.
A city government detects engine fault code alerts to reduce vehicle downtime for maintenance.
A garbage truck company reduces speeding violations by its drivers, thereby reducing lawsuits and insurance costs.
A US Postal Service contractor uses dashboard cameras to collect data on drivers’ behavior. This improves driver safety and allows the customer to win more contracts.
A customer replaces hand-written time cards with automated mileage and hours-tracking. This saves money on wages by eliminating drivers’ fudging of hours.
A dairy transport company uses temperature sensors to ensure appropriate temps are maintained from supplier to warehouse to customer.
These efficiencies are achieved by collecting data from sensors and cameras (IoT devices) installed in fleet vehicles. These data points are sent to the cloud where management can analyze all the IoT data across their entire organization through Samsara’s software. AI algorithms provide insights to management to achieve cost savings, increased safety, increased compliance, and better customer satisfaction.
TAM
Here is the crux of their pitch (from the S-1):
“Unlike retail, advertising, media, and information technology, which have already undergone digital transformation, industries with physical operations are still in the early stages of digital adoption. Historically, the ability to connect their assets to the Internet has been limited by the physical nature of these industries. In addition, the cost and availability of sensors, compute capability, storage, video, and analytical processing have prevented widespread analysis of operations data. However, with advancements in IoT connectivity, cloud computing, video imagery, and AI, we believe industries that depend on physical operations are at the precipice of a massive wave of digital adoption. Samsara is enabling this transformation. We estimate that the total addressable market opportunity for our solution worldwide will be approximately $54.6 billion by the end of 2021, growing … to $96.9 billion by the end of 2024.”
Financials
The S-1 statement is here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1642896/000119312521…
Revenue (pg 101)
---- Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
2019 19 25 33 41
2020 50 56 66 75
2021 87 101 114
Growth YoY
2019
2020 163% 124% 100% 83%
2021 74% 80% 73%
Growth Seq
2019 ----- 21% 32% 24%
2020 22% 12% 18% 14%
2021 17% 16% 13%
Gross Margins
2019 57% 59% 60% 61%
2020 67% 67% 72% 72%
2021 71% 72% 72%
Adj Operating margin
2019 (200%) (200%) (187%) (162%)
2020 (124%) (84%) (52%) (41%)
2021 (42%) (30%) (26%)
Adj FCF
2019 (39) (44) (59) (74)
2020 (63) (52) (39) (36)
2021 (40) (47) (43)
Custs >100K ARR YoY growth
2019
2020 210% 155% 105% 77%
2021 82% 89% 83%
NRR for all custs > 115%
NRR for +100K custs > 125%
Samsara is growing at a high clip with steady and high gross margins, increasing profitability, and a good NRR. They plan on using IOT as their ticker. Any comments are welcome!
Additional Samsara write-ups can be found here:
https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/samsara-benchmarking…
https://tomtunguz.com/samsara-s-1/?utm_source=dlvr.it&ut…
https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News/88827/IoT…