Fleet telematics provider Samsara Inc. filed suit against rival Motive Technologies in federal court Wednesday, alleging Motive, formerly KeepTruckin, copied and used its proprietary technology, engaged in false and misleading promoting and created fictitious accounts to realize access to Samsara’s connected vehicle platforms.
Within the 94-page lawsuit filed within the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, Samsara claims Motive, a dashcam and GPS provider, based much of its product line and its business strategy on “routinely stealing Samsara’s technologies and fraudulently accessing Samsara’s platforms,” the corporate said in a press release.
Over a four-year period from 2018 to 2022, Samsara claims Motive employees covertly viewed Samsara’s dashboard, which the corporate describes because the “epicenter for all the information collection and reporting across all Samsara products — Fleet Telematics (VG Series), Fleet Safety Cameras (CM Series), and Asset Tracking” on its website.
Motive didn’t immediately reply to FreightWaves’ request looking for comment.
Samsara (NYSE: IOT), a developer of the connected operations cloud, was founded by Sanjit Biswas, the corporate’s CEO, and John Bicket, who serves as its CTO, in 2015. The 2 met as graduate students on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In a press release, Samsara claims it was forced to file suit against San Francisco-based Motive after greater than a yr of urging Motive’s leadership and board of directors “to stop their illegal activities.”
Samsara raised $805 million in its initial public offering in November 2021 after pricing shares at $23 each, the highest of the proposed range. The corporate’s valuation is around $12 billion.
San Francisco-based Samsara has greater than 1,600 employees worldwide and has greater than 20,000 customers within the energy, food and beverage, construction and manufacturing and transportation industries.
Samsara’s data platform applications offer video-based safety, vehicle telematics and apps and driver workflows.
In a founders’ note concerning the lawsuit, Biswas and Bicket claim they found a comprehensive years-long campaign by Motive to repeat Samsara, “from our patented technologies right down to our company mission statement,” while investigating a third-party benchmark report, which was paid for by Motive, about its products in 2022.
“Specifically, Motive’s senior management team, including its CEO Shoaib Makani did the whole lot from creating Samsara customer accounts under fictitious names, to accessing our systems, to calling our support lines to solicit details about our platform.”
![](https://www.freightwaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/24/Motive_CEO_Shoaib_Makani-1.png)
The lawsuit features a screenshot of video footage of a Samsara device claiming to point out Makani and Jairam Ranganathan, Motive’s chief product officer, “studying Samsara’s products.”
Motive is embattled in one other legal fight against one other safety and fleet technology provider Omnitracs, which filed suit against the telematics provider in October. The lawsuit centers on 11 patents Motive allegedly copied from Omnitracs.
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FreightWaves’ Noi Mahoney contributed to this report.
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