Samsara reports strong Q2 earnings as proprietary operations data drives enterprise growth beyond knowledge work

Connected operations platform vendor Samsara delivered another strong quarter, with revenues reaching $391.5 million and annual recurring revenue (ARR) hitting $1.6 billion, both representing 30% year-over-year growth. But beneath these headline figures is a telling story about how the company is building what CEO Sanjit Biswas calls a "unique and proprietary data asset" that positions it uniquely as enterprise buyers (and vendors!) grapple with AI's impact on traditional work models.

The San Francisco-based company, which provides IoT platforms for physical operations, ended Q2 with what Biswas described as "approximately 20 trillion data points annually on our platform" - data that he emphasized "is not found on the Internet." This massive dataset, collected from gateways, cameras and sensors deployed across customers' operations, represents something fundamentally different from the information sources that power most enterprise AI applications.

Unlike software companies whose revenue scales with headcount or knowledge workers - the roles that AI threatens to automate - Samsara's business model aligns with physical assets and operations that require human presence. As Biswas explained during the earnings call:

Our business model scales with physical assets rather than headcount or knowledge workers and aligns us [with] end markets that are poised to benefit from major initiatives like the global AI infrastructure build-out.

Enterprise momentum drives growth

The quarter's most significant highlight was the concentration of growth among Samsara's largest customers. The company added a quarterly record of 17 customers with more than $1 million in ARR, bringing that cohort to 147 customers who now contribute more than 20% of total ARR - approximately $350 million.

More broadly, customers with ARR over $100,000 now generate approximately $1 billion of ARR, representing 35% year-over-year growth and accounting for 59% of total ARR, up from 57% a year ago. The company now serves 2,771 customers in this tier, compared to 2,120 a year ago.

This enterprise concentration reflects what Biswas characterized as successful execution of the company's strategy “to partner with the world's largest and most complex operations organizations." 

During Q2, Samsara signed partnerships with Alaska Airlines, the fifth largest airline in the U.S., SRM Concrete, the largest ready-mix concrete provider in the U.S., and what the company described as "one of the largest Fortune 1000 rental equipment companies in North America."

The appeal to these large enterprises appears rooted in Samsara's ability to address operational complexity at scale. As Biswas noted:

These are customers where they have very asset and labor-intensive operations for them to get deep visibility into which assets are being used and how much and if they're operating safely, if they can find labor efficiencies, it makes a really big difference in their operations.

The leadership at the vendor said that Samsara's positioning becomes particularly compelling as enterprises invest heavily in AI infrastructure. The company's customers are directly involved in these projects while simultaneously seeking efficiency gains to meet compressed schedules and safety requirements. Biswas explained:

AI infrastructure build-out is a really interesting theme. If you think about who our customers are, they're the world of physical operations. These are folks like the construction companies, the field services companies like the electricians, for example, that are involved in these projects as well as the electric utilities.

Construction drove the highest net new ACV mix of all industries for the eighth consecutive quarter, highlighting sustained demand from this sector. Biswas noted:

[These organizations] are trying to find ways to keep up with this demand and operate smarter. These are very compressed schedules. They demand a lot of efficiency, and they also have to be safe while they're doing all this work.

The public sector also showed strength, with wins across several state departments including Nebraska DOT, large municipalities like Nashville, and a leading passenger transit agency in Los Angeles. Manufacturing delivered its highest net new ACV mix ever, led by SRM Concrete's initial purchase that included video-based safety, vehicle telematics, equipment monitoring, connected workflows and commercial navigation.

New products gain traction

The company's product expansion also showed promising early results, with 8 percent of net new ACV in Q2 coming from products launched in the past year. This included asset tags, connected workflows, connected training, asset maintenance, AI multicam and commercial navigation.

During the company’s recent customer conference, Samsara Beyond, the company announced a number of new products and features, which included asset maintenance for monitoring vehicle and equipment upkeep, commercial navigation tailored to large commercial vehicles, route planning for optimization, AI Multicam providing 360-degree video coverage, and worker safety protection for frontline workers.

The asset tags product, launched last year, signed its largest deal to date with Bonnie Plants, the largest U.S. supplier and producer of vegetable and herb plants, who deployed 15,000 asset tags to track their owned and leased cart fleet.

The early traction reflects what appears to be careful customer development. As Biswas explained regarding the new products: 

A number of them are hitting and resonating well... With all of these products, it takes some time for these customers to figure out how they're going to adopt them on the platform and the change management for the front line. These folks often have tens of thousands of frontline workers.

Samsara's approach to leveraging its data scale represents a departure from traditional IoT platforms. Rather than simply providing monitoring capabilities, the company is using its collective dataset to deliver insights that individual organizations could never achieve alone.

The company's new "Street Sense" capability highlights this approach, using anonymized imagery from millions of connected dash cameras to provide real-time visibility into weather conditions and road hazards. As Biswas described it: 

That's not something that was possible until we have the scale of data and then AI to process it, understand these conditions, and help provide it in a privacy-preserving sort of way.

This network effect strategy addresses a fundamental challenge in IoT: creating value beyond simple data collection. By aggregating operational data across its customer base, Samsara can identify patterns and provide benchmarking that helps customers understand their performance relative to peers.

The company processes what it describes as "120 billion API calls and 14 trillion data points" annually, providing visibility into operational patterns across industries and geographies that individual organizations lack.

My take

Despite the strong results, Samsara did experience some sales cycle elongation in Q1 following tariff announcements, though the company noted that "all of the impacted larger transactions closed in Q2" and it "didn't experience further tariff-related impact in the quarter."

The expansion into new product categories also brings competitive challenges, as Samsara increasingly competes with established players in areas like transportation management and route optimization. However, the company's integrated approach and established customer relationships provide advantages in cross-selling additional capabilities.

As Samsara scales its platform ambitions beyond its safety stronghold, execution will become increasingly important. The next several quarters will reveal whether Samsara can maintain momentum as it expands into the full complexity of physical operations management while preserving the clear ROI proposition that has driven its enterprise success. 

However, what’s clear is that the vendor’s unique data asset - one that isn’t easily replicated and is well protected from the broader AI knowledge economy - is serving the company well. And as its network effect of product features continues to expand, it’s likely that those enterprise-sized deals will continue to expand. It looks like a positive few quarters ahead for the IoT vendor.