Samsara: Cut 313 Jobs in May 2020, No PPP Loan

Category: physical-world technology
Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
Last updated: 2026-11-01

In the archive

Article: How 41 Companies Handled Pandemic Layoffs
Profile: Zeus Living

Founders, executives and investors

Business Insider described Samsara in August 2020 as a five-year-old startup. Its spokespeople in 2020 were Lindsay McKinley, director of communications, and Aidan Madigan-Curtis, who ran its Connected Worker unit. The company now trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker IOT.

Business before the pandemic

Samsara sells hardware and software that report what is happening in physical operations: vehicle location and diagnostics, equipment status, and camera footage from trucks and work sites. Its cameras and sensors, Business Insider reported, could tell whether a construction worker was wearing a hard hat or walking too close to dangerous machinery, and send the data to live dashboards. The Connected Worker unit had launched in the fall of 2019.

What the pandemic did to the business

Customers in public transportation and travel cut back. "In this environment, a lot of projects are put on pause," Madigan-Curtis said. In March 2020 Samsara closed its offices and suspended non-essential travel, its IPO prospectus says. In May it raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation, down from $6.3 billion eight months earlier.

Samsara turned its sales effort to customers still working through lockdowns: food and beverage distribution, manufacturing, energy, construction, warehousing and logistics. The coffee chain Philz Coffee used its cameras to check that employees wore masks and stayed six feet apart. From January to May 2020, Business Insider reported, Samsara's customer count grew 50 percent to more than 15,000. "What's pretty interesting about the environment right now is we expected more negativity than there was," Madigan-Curtis said.

Revenue for the fiscal year ended January 30, 2021, was $249.9 million, against $119.9 million the year before, the prospectus shows. By late 2021 the company said it had resumed hiring, "with a near-term goal of growing our employee base beyond our pre-pandemic size."

Relief

SBA's PPP loan data list no loan to Samsara Inc. The prospectus says "the income tax provisions of the CARES Act did not have a significant impact" on Samsara's current taxes, deferred taxes or uncertain tax positions.

Layoffs

"In an effort to reduce our expenses to ensure that we could continue to operate in a sustainable manner should the pandemic have sustained a prolonged economic downturn," the prospectus says, Samsara cut 313 jobs in May 2020; Layoffs.fyi reported 300, about 18 percent of its staff. How Samsara handled layoffs →

Going public

Samsara sold 35,000,000 shares of Class A stock at $23.00 in its December 2021 IPO, for estimated net proceeds of about $762.3 million.

Since 2025

Samsara's newsroom, as of June 2026, described the company as having "tens of thousands of customers across North America and Europe" in transportation, construction, logistics and energy. It filed its most recent annual report on Form 10-K with the SEC on March 16, 2026. That report, for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026, shows revenue of $1.62 billion, against $250 million in the fiscal year that ended January 30, 2021, and a net loss of $9.1 million, against $210 million that year; cash from operations was $236 million. Samsara counted more than 12,000 "Core Customers," each paying $25,000 or more a year, and had more than 4,100 full-time employees, up from more than 3,500 a year earlier.

Samsara