I work in this space and watch a couple of companies. I believe there is opportunity here, but there are some hidden issues.
Here are two companies aged between about 6 and 10 in the space.
https://www.aeris.com/
https://autonomic.ai/
Aeris started out reselling Sprint bandwidth and levered that into an IoT company. But they ran into a growth problem: vehicle manufacturers recognized IoT as a key need, but they liked IoT so much, they saw it as strategic and started their own in-house efforts. Which hurts Aeris’s market. Aeris is private.
Autonomic was a startup with some seed money from Ford. Ford liked it so much, they bought the rest of the company. Now it is a wholly-owned subsidiary. This is emblematic of the problems Aeris faces: where can you get volume without being designed out eventually?
So looking at Samsara, I’d be looking closely at who the customers are and whether they can get volume, whether they are working with ‘leftovers’, or whether there is an independent (non-manufacturer) channel with growth potential. That TAM won’t all be available to independent companies.
This is not a deep technology area. It combines a bunch of messy stuff — cloud, cellular, data-in-motion, analytics, GPS applications, and more. But none of those are a bleeding-edge barrier. The technology is a complex commodity. So we need a barrier someplace else. You will find the key feature sets in lots of places: collecting telematics, shipping out commands to devices, tracking, triggering events, etc.
We should also expect to see design-in patterns in sales. Small sales while products are being designed, followed by growth as the new product enters manufacturing and distribution, followed by additional product lines from that customer. But there can be gaps. Or customers can decide to do future work in-house once they understand the tech.
But, for the right one, there is strong growth here. Could Samsara be the one?
I hope that’s useful. I’m keen to contribute what I do know about, since I pick up so much knowledge from the experts here!
I have no investments in this space.