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Samsara Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

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The profile

Samsara, a San Francisco Bay Area maker of internet-connected sensors and cameras for fleets, factories and building sites, laid off 300 employees, about 18 percent of its staff, in May 2020. In the same month it raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation, down from $6.3 billion eight months earlier.

  • Category: physical-world technology
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
  • Last updated: 2026-09-25

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 changed

Customers in public transportation and travel cut back. "In this environment, a lot of projects are put on pause," Madigan-Curtis said. Layoffs.fyi reported that Samsara blamed the economic downturn without giving details, and that the cuts came with a 30 percent cut in executive salaries for the rest of the year, a six-month hiring freeze and cuts to non-essential spending. The company published an official directory of laid-off staff; Layoffs.fyi counted 100 names on it, mostly in the Bay Area.

McKinley called the layoff "a hard decision, but definitely the right one for the business." She said the cuts were deep so that there would be only one round, and that many of the people let go worked in "frontier markets" such as Europe, where the path to profitability was longer, or in recruiting, events and field marketing. "No matter how long a recession lasts and how bad the economy gets that we can reach profitability on our own without a need to raise additional funding," she told Business Insider.

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.

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.

Sources

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