The First $100,000,000 ARR at Samsara: How Founder CEO Sanjit Biswas Built a Platform Giant by Digitizing the Physical World
Samsara is one of the most successful vertical SaaS companies of all time. They’ve just crossed a stunning $1.75 Billion in ARR — growing 29%. That’s about as good as it gets, folks.
CEO Sanjit Biswas, the co-founder and CEO of Samsara sat down with SaaStr as they were crossing $1B in ARR. And we did a deep dive on how they transformed fleet management from a creaky, legacy category into a massive, modern platform opportunity.
Sanjit is a two-time founder with over 20 years of building experience. Before Samsara, he and his co-founder John Bicket built Meraki, which they sold to Cisco for $1.2 billion in 2012. That exit seemed stunning at the time—four years to a billion-dollar acquisition. But what they’ve built with Samsara has eclipsed even that remarkable achievement.
Here’s what I learned about how they got to the first $100M ARR—and the key things they did to win.
#1. They Went Back to Beginner’s Mind in a New Domain
After selling Meraki to Cisco for $1.2 billion, most founders would have been done. Sanjit and John had never taken a vacation. They had young kids. They’d already proven they could build something incredible. So why start over—and in a completely different market?
“It showed us what it meant to have impact. We believed Wi-Fi was going to be a big deal when we started doing networking research in the early 2000s. It was really cool to be part of bringing it out to the world. That’s what got us excited.”
After their earn-out at Cisco, they took some time off. But then they started tinkering again. As Sanjit put it: “As engineers, we just like building things. We like being useful.”
What’s fascinating is how they chose their next market. They didn’t dust off the Meraki playbook and run it again in networking. They became genuinely curious about the physical operations world—asking big questions like “where do all the emissions in the world come from?”—and kept discovering fascinating problems no one was solving with modern technology.
Key Insight: The best second-time founders don’t repeat their playbook—they go back to beginner’s mind in a new domain. That forces genuine innovation rather than pattern-matching.
#2. They Got the Band Back Together
Four members of Samsara’s senior team worked together at Meraki. The name “Samsara” itself means the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth—the team being reborn together. Even many of their early sales leaders and reps came from Meraki.
I’ve seen this experiment tried many times. Sometimes it works beautifully. Sometimes the band doesn’t want to get back together—they want to be CEO next time, or they’re on their own journey. What makes it work?
According to Sanjit, three things are essential:
- Chemistry and mutual respect. The team needs to genuinely enjoy working together. They’ve been personal friends for 15-20 years.
- New challenges for everyone. Kieran, who runs product now, used to run marketing at Meraki and was an engineer before that. Ben, who runs hardware, was doing different hardware at Meraki. Everyone needs enough challenge to stay engaged.
- Radical honesty without ego. They each know their strengths and weaknesses, and they can be completely open with each other about it.
“We’re all figuring this out together. It’s not like any of us have done this at this scale. Once that humility is there, it’s much more possible to have a real conversation. When egos are at play, that’s when you see the crazy conflicts.”
Key Insight: A great co-founder is someone you’d like to talk to at the end of each day. If you enjoy catching up, it’s a good sign the partnership can endure.
#3. They Let Customers Redirect Them to the Real Opportunity
Samsara didn’t start with fleet management. They started with the simplest cloud-connected sensor they could imagine: a temperature sensor.
They took it into two industries—food and beverage, and pharma/biotech—thinking those companies had temperature-sensitive assets that might spoil. But their initial beta testers pointed them somewhere else entirely.
“They said: this is cool, but our big fridges don’t actually break very much. What does break is the cold chain—when we try to move something from site to site. One customer was losing $10,000 of cheese on deliveries to Whole Foods because someone would leave the doors open.”
That customer feedback led them into fleet tracking. They started shadowing operations teams, spending time in loading docks and warehouses. What they discovered was stunning: everything was done on pen and paper. Phone calls to figure out where people were. GPS tracking that dropped a breadcrumb every 15-30 minutes. Super antiquated.
Meanwhile, in the consumer world, Uber and DoorDash were showing everyone what real-time tracking could look like. The obvious question: why can’t every commercial fleet have that same capability?
Key Insight: Your first product might not be your biggest product. Listen to what customers actually need, not what you think they need. The real opportunity was hiding in the feedback.
#4. They Brought Consumer-Grade Technology to an Overlooked Enterprise Market
Before Samsara, the fleet management market was maybe $500 million across all vendors—companies like Qualcomm’s OmniTrax and Verizon, charging a lot of money for very limited capability on creaky old networks. Now Samsara alone is at $1.26 billion and growing 36%.
The legacy players had been acquired by private equity, their R&D teams hollowed out, frozen in time. The products were clunky and expensive—not worth the effort for most fleets.
Here’s what Samsara did differently:
- Leveraged technology shifts: Cellular became ubiquitous, GPU compute enabled inference capabilities, mobile apps changed expectations
- Used consumer expectations as a wedge: Everyone saw real-time tracking in their personal lives and asked “why can’t I have this for my 5,000 vehicles?”
- Made deployment practical: Samsara made it easy to deploy in any fleet, not just long-haul trucking
- Built a platform, not a point solution: They didn’t just solve one problem—they built to solve multiple problems for the same customer
Key Insight: The best markets are often hidden inside old, “solved” categories where the incumbents have stopped innovating. Consumer technology often previews what enterprise customers will demand.
#5. They Used the 80/20 Rule for Multi-Product Expansion
Samsara’s biggest product today isn’t telematics—it’s driver safety coaching, using cameras and AI to detect risky behavior and prevent accidents. That product wasn’t even in the cards when they started the company.
How did it happen? Customers asked for it.
“Customers would say: this is an amazing telematics product—is there a camera you recommend that integrates really well? That didn’t exist in the market. So we built them one.”
They started working on safety products somewhere around $10-20M ARR, when they were growing from $1M to $7M to close to $70M in rapid succession. But they weren’t chasing product line exhaustion—they were just solving more problems for customers.
Their rule: the 80/20 filter. Once 80% of customers are asking about something, you should probably build it.
The power of this approach shows in the data. Today, most Samsara customers use multiple products—two, three, or more in the enterprise. The telematics product alone is over $500M in ARR and still growing north of 30%. It’s not cannibalization; it’s platform expansion.
The Data Flywheel
When customers buy both telematics and safety, something powerful happens. If an accident occurs, you don’t just see the camera footage—you can see if the driver’s foot was on the accelerator or brake, how fast they were going, whether they were on route, whether they’d been on shift for eight hours.
This combined data creates insights neither product could deliver alone. And at Samsara’s scale, they see patterns across thousands of large companies that no one else can match.
Key Insight: Multi-product isn’t about diversification—it’s about solving more problems for the same customer. When products share data, 1+1=3.
#6. They Expanded Verticals Through Campaigns, Not Business Units
Here’s a stat that surprised me: 87% of Samsara’s new bookings now come from outside transportation—construction, utilities, field services, and more. When they started, it was 100% transportation.
How did they expand into these very different verticals without creating separate business units?
“We think of them more as campaigns. We said: let’s go understand the customer, build technology partnerships for their software stack, speak their language in marketing and case studies. But we never specialized the sales team, and we never specialized the product teams.”
The only exception is public sector, which has different buying cycles and contract structures. But even there, it’s the same products—just a different go-to-market motion.
Their approach was to borrow 80% of the platform for each new vertical and build the 20% that makes it resonate. The same sales rep can win deals in trucking, then pick up construction deals, then open up the HVAC field service market.
Key Insight: Vertical expansion doesn’t require vertical teams. It requires understanding the customer deeply and having a platform that’s 80% transferable.
#7. They Used “Wow Features” to Break Into New Markets
The key to making vertical expansion work in new markets where legacy vendors have 20 years of relationships? What Sanjit calls “wow features”—capabilities that the legacy player simply doesn’t have on their roadmap.
“You demo it live over Zoom and the prospect says: okay, you don’t really speak my language, I get that you’re from this other industry. But I could really use that feature—that sounds great.”
The wow feature overcomes the relationship disadvantage. You don’t need to speak their language perfectly if you can show them something they’ve never seen before—real-time tracking, AI in the camera, mobile apps that actually work. The incumbent literally can’t match it.
Key Insight: When entering a new vertical, lead with differentiated capabilities that incumbents can’t match. One genuinely useful feature can overcome years of incumbent relationships.
#8. They Filtered by Complexity, Not Just Company Size
Samsara serves customers from $8K deals all the way up to massive enterprise deployments. But they don’t try to serve everyone.
Their filter isn’t company size—it’s operational complexity.
“If you have 10,000 trucks, we’re super useful. But you might have 40-50 vehicles across four different states, and they view their operations as complex. Or they have Hazmat, or something else that makes their operations complex. We’re a good product for them because they get a lot of value from the software, the reports, the APIs.”
On the other hand, if you have a simple operation, you can probably get by with an inexpensive basic product. You don’t need Samsara’s full platform capabilities.
There’s an interesting dynamic in physical operations: unlike tech, where startups grow and get big, operations companies are often asset-intensive and labor-intensive. Private equity consolidates them into bigger and bigger entities. A company that starts small often gets rolled up into something more complex.
Key Insight: The filter for who you serve doesn’t have to be company size or revenue. “Complexity” can be a better proxy for who will value your full platform.
#9. They Built AI That Solves Real Problems, Not AI for AI’s Sake
Here’s what I love about Samsara’s approach to AI: their customers don’t go shopping for “GPT-4 enabled bots.” That’s not their world or their language.
What they are trying to figure out is how to reduce risk on the road. And AI is incredibly useful for that—you have all this data about where people are driving, how long they’ve been on shift, whether they run stop signs, how often they speed. The only way to sift through millions of hours of GPS traces is with AI.
“AI finds the insight in the data, then you need the workflow to take action. If you close the loop for the customer, you eliminate the risk or cut it way down. That creates the value.”
Their first mainstream AI use case was surprisingly simple: detecting mobile phone use while driving. A convolutional network doing image recognition to spot when drivers were looking at their phones. It would provide a beep—a coaching moment to break the habit.
Now they’ve rolled out drowsiness detection. One large customer piloted it and went from regular drowsiness incidents to zero incidents in a week—for drivers doing long hauls through West Texas with no lights.
“That’s the kind of thing where you’re doing something that’s saving lives. It feels really fulfilling. And as an engineer, you’re like: what else can we do now?”
Key Insight: AI is an enabling technology, not a product. The value comes from solving real problems—not from the AI itself. Your customers don’t want AI; they want outcomes.
#10. The CEO Still Gets Energy From Customers
What strikes me most about this conversation is how Sanjit still gets energy from visiting customers. He learns something on every single trip. He comes back with product ideas that go into production. After 20 years of building companies, he’s still excited to see autonomous tractors controlled by apps and robots running around distribution warehouses.
“The fun part is I see more problems we can solve every time I get to a site. It feels like you’re being useful. There’s something deeply fulfilling about that.”
That’s what sustains founders through the long journey. If you don’t gain energy from meeting with customers, maybe you should find another CEO. It’s not a criticism—it’s just a sign.
Key Insight: The best founders are still curious, still learning, still energized by customer problems after 20 years. That’s not something you can fake.
The 10 Step Playbook to The First $100,000,000 in ARR
Sanjit and I joked that we’d check back in when Samsara hits $5 billion in ARR. Based on their trajectory—and the market opportunity ahead of them—that’s not as far off as it might sound.
Here’s the playbook that got them to $100M and beyond:
- Go back to beginner’s mind in a new domain
- Get the band back together—with new challenges for everyone
- Let customers redirect you to the real opportunity
- Bring consumer-grade technology to overlooked enterprise markets
- Use the 80/20 rule for multi-product expansion
- Expand verticals through campaigns, not business units
- Lead with “wow features” to break incumbent relationships
- Filter by complexity, not just company size
- Build AI that solves real problems
- Stay close to customers—forever
That’s the essence of building a great company. Keep finding new problems to solve. Keep being useful. The numbers rack themselves up in the background.
