The Series C financing round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz and Samsara’s founders. The round valued Samsara at over $530 million as the company’s revenues grow in excess of 250% annually.
Meanwhile, Hemant Taneja, Managing Director at General Catalyst has joined Marc Andreessen, founding partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Samsara founders — Sanjit Biswas, and John Bicket on Samsara’s board of directors.
The company claims to have established a broad customer base in transportation, food and beverage, energy, and field services.
Samsara’s complete hardware-software platform combines data from sensors, GPS, cameras, and mobile apps in an integrated, cloud-based solution. Its enterprise-scale deployments include long haul trucking companies, Fortune 500 food producers, passenger transit operators, local governments, and public utilities.
Samsara was founded in early 2015 by Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket. Sanjit and John previously co-founded Meraki, the cloud networking leader. Meraki was acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion in 2012.
The new financing brings the company’s total capital raised to $80 million. The company claims that by reinvesting revenues from product sales, the company had over two thirds of its Series A and Series B financing remaining on hand upon raising this round.
“Thanks to our faster-than-market sales growth, we didn’t need additional outside funding for day to day operations,” said Sanjit Biswas, Samara’s co-founder and CEO. “But we believe that Samsara’s approach to IoT can have a broad impact across large markets. We’ve already seen the technology benefit customers ranging from vehicle fleet operators to water utilities to energy producers. This new financing lets us invest in long-term technology development to explore new applications for our platform.”
Hemant Taneja, Managing Director at General Catalyst, said, “The traction and acceleration of growth that Samsara has seen are impressive but not at all surprising. The team is successfully replicating the playbook they developed at Meraki in an even bigger market. Their ambitious vision of the ‘industrial internet’ is already delivering significant value to the industrial businesses that power our economy and they’re just getting started. We’re incredibly happy to be on board.”
