How Tive Grew From a $19.99 Truck Tracker to a $100M Run Rate

Alright. In this episode, you're gonna see how a strange founder built a weird piece of hardware in his basement and turned it into a $540,000,000 business that's totally taking over the supply chain industry. He's got over 1,300 paying customers, and the biggest ones pay him a fortune. Today, he's adding over $10,000,000 of new annual revenue per quarter. Incredible growth. And he's got a bold vision for how to use AI and agents to automate the entire supply

chain. But it wasn't always this easy. Watch until the end and you'll see exactly how to get your first 100 customers the easy way, how to set your AE quota targets so you don't screw up your economics, and lastly, the genius way to price your products so you finally get your first million dollar per year customer. Here's the CEO of tive.com. Krenar, are you ready to take us to the top? I can't bury the lead.

I reached out literally hours ago because

you posted on LinkedIn that you hit a massive revenue milestone. What was the milestone? And then we'll jump into your story.

Yeah. Huge milestone last week. We hit a 100,000,000 booked annual run rate. That's awesome. So it's just amazing. We will do very confident. We'll do a 100,000,000 record growth rate year over year.

What were you one year ago?

So one year ago, we're at 67, so we'll do at least, looks like a 100 this year.

Be clear, if we take MRR from December 2025, you're at a 67,000,000 run rate then.

No. December MRR. So 67 was the whole recognized revenue of the whole 2025. The December MRR, I don't know the exact number on top of my head, but I know we closed the year in check because we do January. It's fiscal year. It was at 89,000,000 of booked annual run rate. So we went from 89 to 100 between January 31 and... Growth. And and, guys, you wanna listen to

this whole interview because he's building something that's really interesting. You're seeing the world of AI. Anyone that has a data moat really wins. And one way to build an impressive data moat is to have a SaaS plus business model. We have IoT plus SaaS. He has... We're gonna get into it in a second, but, Tive, what are... Sorry. Not Tive. Krenar, why don't you explain your business model? What are you selling?

So it's pretty straightforward. Customers come to us. They wanna know what's happening with their ship shipments all over the world, whether it's strawberries, blueberries, servers, electronics, gaming consoles. Oh, hold it up, camera roll. These trackers where they... I wanna hold it up. And, oh, you see the... You're up the website too. That's awesome. So what they do is they buy these trackers. So they sign up a contract. It's an annual contract, and they say, hey. I wanna buy 1,200 of these, and they commit to them, and I also sign So for

where does that get installed? Does it get installed on a truck? Like, turn around a little bit. Okay. So is there a camera on there?

Yeah. So what we do what we do... That customers do is they take this. They press the button right there. This turns on. They peel the sticker on the back. Most of the time, they peel the sticker, and they open the trailer or the container when it's open already, it's at the dock. They load it up the trailer and the container with, let's say, pallets of servers, pallets of electronics, pallets of gaming console, pallets of vacuum

cleaners, whatever it is. They take this tracker and they place it usually on the last pallet. Sometimes they hide it because they don't want anybody to see it. Then they close the trailer, this thing is on, it's transmitting in real time using cellular connectivity. So two g, four g, five g connectivity all over the world. So, it tells customers where the shipment is in real time, but also it's telling its condition. Is it hot? Is it

wet? Is it cold? Did somebody open the trailer? There's a little light sensor right there. Did this get dropped? There's a shock sensor. There's also an orientation sensor to see if something's tilted. So all of that data on top of location is being fed into our platform, and then customers log in and see and monitor their shipments. So now they know, are those berries above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for more than an hour? Are those vaccines on

a tarmac somewhere sitting at 90 degrees Fahrenheit? And they were able to immediately call a logistics company, call the carrier, call the trucking company, and act on it. And we saved so many shipments, Especially, even to these days with theft, we catch... Like, we have a story recently with this company. The guy literally with his wife was driving trying to... Found the driver who was stealing the... Like, there was just a truck full of metal, and

they they called the guy at the truck stop and called the police. How much data exhaust are

you generating from one of those devices? If I took all the unstructured data and structured it a JSON file, how many rows of data points would I get just from that one tracker and one truck shipment?

Per ping, I would say at least around 12 to 15. So think of x y z of accelerometer, then you get temperature, then you get humidity, you get shock if it happens, light, and then location. You have GPS. You have WiFi positioning. You have also cellular towers that we get. So there's around 15 or so points per ping. And then people can be pinging every five minutes, every 30. So if you do the math, we're... We've collected billions and billions of What

are your run rating on that? Like, you

if you do last 05/12/2026,

if you just look at last month, how many individual... I don't know what the right usage metric is. Is it number... How many total pings you captured across all customers? Is it number of installed devices, number truck trips? What's the critical metric for you? There's a few. Go for it. The more you can show us, the better. The more we can learn.

Okay. I'll

This is I'll show

you to do that.

This is so cool. Guys, while he's breaking that up again, what we're gonna sort of go with on this is we're going back to his basement in 2007 when he had this idea all the way up to, you know, now a 100,000,000 run rate. You know, this is not just software. Obviously, there's production involved, IoT. I'll ask him if he's manufacturing these himself, if he's making money on the hardware, or if he's subsidizing at the start just to get the long term subscription contracts. We'll dive into all of that.

Yeah. So I think some of this is maybe not great to share or not as a little confidential.

I appreciate it.

Let me see if I any data point No. I would really focus on

moving on that blue graph. You told

us when you passed

a 100 k of ARR. When did you... Put put your point on the graph where you passed a million of ARR. What year?

Right. The... Oh, million? It was in 2020 around, I would say 10,000,000. This time here. Now you're making... Equizzing me. 10,000,000. It was 2,500,000 in twenty twenty dollars, 2020. Yeah. It was in 2021 sometime. Yeah. I was So sorry. You went from 1,000,000

in 2020 to 10,000,000 in 2021?

Yeah. It was at the end of twenty nineteen, I would say early twenty twenty, we crossed that 1,000,000 right here. And then by end of twenty twenty one or mid, like, call it Q3, Q4 of twenty twenty one, we went to 10,000,000 of books. We were growing very fast at that time because we signed up to really large stores. And then if you if you happen, revenues were pretty exciting too. I'll I'll wanna share them.

When did you just finish the revenue story real quick and then I wanna get your backstory in your basement. When did you break 50,000,000?

Revenue. So revenue in 2020... So let's go this way. We'll do 100 this year. 67,000,000 last year. 45 in 2024. 29,000,000 in 2023 revenue. '19, almost 20,000,000 in twenty twenty two, ten million in 2021. So that's when we did 10,000,000 of actual revenue, 2,500,000 of revenue in 2020, and 200 I take you

back to your basement when you launched... You can stop screen sharing. What were you... You were watching your father-in-law, or how did you get this idea?

So my background is in tech. I used to work for startups, but primarily doing chip design, RF chip design, two g, three g, four g, radios. And then I worked for an MIT startup where we build the world's most efficient base stations that go on cell towers. Fell in love with wireless. Fell in love with radio frequencies.

Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into 550 software companies so far, again at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com, and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube, and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com.

Back in 2015, I got... Met my wife. I got married to my wife in 2010. So you married before you were rich. Few years. Hanging on. Oh, that's for sure. I'm not rich yet. Still a Founder. Still a pretty poor Founder living on salary, which is great, but I think I Well, why is that?

You haven't done a secondary? Any kind of secondary? Okay.

I did, but small. Being transparent, few $100,000. So maybe helped a little bit with the mortgage.

A lot founders are scared to ask for that. They're like, you know, they're growing. They end up with a 100,000,000 of revenue, but they're broke because they didn't... Never did a secondary. What gave you the courage to ask for that? Just coach other founders.

I would say one of my investors actually encouraged me quite a bit, on series a one, which gave me that courage. Otherwise, I wouldn't have the courage. And then from there, I built that courage to ask a little bit more. But, yeah, it was from Two Sigma Ventures. He got Billy Ilchef. He put a term sheet and he's like, I think you should take a little bit off the table. That's awesome.

Okay. Tell us more of the story. So, yeah, when... I have your LinkedIn up here.

In 2015, I'm I'm, with my father-in-law, and, obviously, I've known him for a few years now. But after this WiLux experience and knowing where the technology was going, he was always on the phone trying to figure out where his truck drivers are. I'm trying to have dinner, and he would get up off the table at 10PM, at 8PM, and I'm like, why can't this guy just sit? What he's doing is trying to figure out where the

truck drivers are. Did they load? Did they offload? Did they unload the shipment? I'm like, you know what? His name is. I'm like, I'll build a GPS tracker for fun and put it in your trucks. And he's like, go ahead. And he's like, there's a lot of companies asking me. I don't wanna pay $50 a month. I'm like, okay. You can pay me $19.99.

Your first customer was your father-in-law paying Correct. $19 a

On a truck. But I pivoted pretty fast from there. So that's the story. And then his friend wanted to track his trucks too. So this guy, Rasimy, had, like, 10 trucks. So I started tracking his trucks. So right now, I'm tracking roughly 30 trucks in Worcester, Massachusetts. They're paying me around 19 I wanted that $0.99 So it's like $19.99 a month on the invoices that I would make up myself. But what I realized is on the

back of the shipment, on the back of the truck, one truck driver, Tony, showed me that there was this temperature sensor. And he would be hauling fish and scallops and lobsters from New Bedford, Mass. And he's like, I said, hey, bring me this sensor that's on the back of the truck. He brought it to me and I said, How do they get the date out of it? He said, Well, at the end of the shipment, somebody

takes this temperature logger, plugs into a computer, sometimes into a printer, and then sees what the temperature was and then decides whether they take this load or not. I'm like, Wow, I got it. So, I said, You know what I want to do? I want to take this tracker that I built, put a battery, make it really low power, and put it on the back of the truck. And being an engineer, I thought that if I

designed the best tracker in the world, or the longest lasting tracker on a battery, I'm just gonna win. And what happened is we didn't fully win because it was expensive. I tried to sell it for a 100... It was a $100 to make, almost a $150 to make, and I would sell it for a $150 $200 and then I would charge customers $50 a month. And I realized one thing, it's not all about product market fit.

It's product market price fit. And I learned a big lesson there, and then took myself and my VP of technology, Martin. We went to China, which actually we're going into

Does come like right after this call?

Yes. It does. So we're going, and it was the same guy. We went to China in '20... Like around '18, I think. Yeah. Early twenty eighteen. And we've met every manufacturer out there that can make a tracker. And we built the world's first single use two gs tracker that we sold for $29 And I saw customers this is twenty nineteen Customers buying thousand at a time. I'm like, okay. This is different. I could barely sell 10 before. Now I'm

selling thousands of battery technology that made you... That allowed you to produce this that no one else could?

Not particularly. What we had is a... We have patents. We have patents on the overall solution and the system that obviously does an amazing job at making sure that the battery power of the trackers last as long as possible. And then when we went to China, what we wanted to do is find a partner there that actually would listen and work with us so we could teach them a little bit of these things because we wanted

to move very fast. We didn't have the time to engineer and design everything on our own. We wanted to partner in China so we could do this cycle very quick. But, yeah, that would be, I would say, the proprietary thing that we had in the beginning is power consumption and a system way making battery life long... Last longer. Think of it, if something's stuck in customs, then change the ping rate. If you're going from motion to

road, change the ping rate. So having that configuration change based on the events that are happening is a pattern that we have. Tell me how many products What

was your go to market strategy after your friends and family shipping scallops? Right? Going from 2.5 to 10,000,000 of revenue, what was your growth tactic there?

I think the biggest lesson that I learned going from being a technical founder, I thought that, like I told you, that my my product was the best, and it would just sell itself, and it didn't. And in 2018, when we're struggling quite a bit, I hired two out of college kids, and what we started to is just cold calling. And we started cold calling, cold calling, cold calling. And what I realized, was cold email, cold call,

cold email, cold call, and I learned so much about products. I learned so much about what customers want. I learned that's where I learned that our trackers cost a lot of money. We need to build something new. And I learned that SDRs or BDRs, whatever you wanna call, that frontline, that spear is actually the heartbeat of the company. And I think many founders forget that, many entrepreneurs forget that. I respect that job more than any other

job since 2018, because that's where the pulse of everything is. And then what I learned is I wanna learn as much from that feedback and then build it and then hire great AEs that listen to that same feedback to the customer and then just grow and grow and grow and grow. That's that's how we grew. Okay.

But what other growth motions are you using today? Is it just sort of AESDRs or something else? Like what?

The marketing too, quite a bit. I mean, I personally do a lot. I try and do a lot on social media, but the marketing team does... They've done a really good job on paid search. So Google, LinkedIn, we're dabbling quite a bit on Facebook right now. And then quite a bit of SEO. I think it has do this, but...

Are you still at, like, $20 a truck per tracker? Or what's your average ACV these days?

Call it in the... Probably call it in the $40 range, maybe more. I guess if

you roll that up, I imagine you're selling to huge companies that are... Like, what would one logo pay you per year on average? Because they're buying for hundreds of thousands of trucks. Right?

So we have only 1,300 logos. So it depends on the customer. There's customers who buy... That's one thing we do really well is we can accommodate the customers who are gonna buy two trackers a week, let's say 100 trackers a year. Obviously, we don't wanna get as many of those customers, but if they come in and they wanna buy, they're very welcome. So we have customers who buy 100 trackers a year, and then we have customers

Do have a million who buy $1 per year customer yet?

Let's go. Oh, yeah. Nice.

I think we have around nine or...

Yeah. It's That are million plus customers. What makes them... What allows your sales reps to upsell or give that much value to them? Is it just number of trucks basically and number of trackers?

That's the easy one. Yeah. I would say just expansion that way because they keep growing and growing. Think of a logistics company and then they just getting more customers into this and more customers and more customers. Or if you're a customer that you're shipping products, say, you okay, I'm gonna start in this region and you open up another region, another region, you go global. Or you start tracking for just one product of yours and then you

expand into all the products. It's pretty exciting on the growth side. Land and expand. So 60% of our new ARR is expansion and forty five forty five

I've got about six minutes left. I wanna spend three minutes on how you've capitalized the business and then three minutes on your future products. Like, how are you thinking about AI and and your world? So let's start on the capital side. I know you've raised rounds. When was the first round?

First round was in November 2000 and Wow. Okay. Wait. This goes way back.

When did you write the first line of code for this thing?

June '20 was the first running on?

Are we talking, like, 500 k from friends and family?

Nothing. It was me working and taking half of the money to pay mortgage and food, and then So that was your amount of money. Put in 50 k, 100 k. And then I did that for over... Yeah. Probably around there for for the last eighteen months. And then I raised from Hyperplane Ventures and Bolt, which was a hardware incubator in Boston, and Hyperplane Ventures is in Boston. And the media raised, I think, 250 k. And then

we did another round of 200 k when we got into Techstars. And so we got into Techstars in in 2017. So this was end of twenty sixteen and then early twenty seventeen. And then in May 2017, raised our first seed round. Think I it was

$3,000,000. Like, looking back now, was that the right decision to raise that 3,000,000 seed at that time?

I think so. Yes. But I I think maybe we could have spent it better. I think we were Would you waste money on? On on spend there. But I don't think we wasted it particularly, but we were building a lot of things around software. We were... We hired a lot of software engineers, which was exciting because we kind of got architecture right in the back end and all of that, but we didn't have no customers. No

customers. I think getting... That's where I learned that lesson. And then we almost ran out of money in 2018, and that's where I had to lay off. We went from, like, 16 people down to six or... Yeah, six or seven people. And that was a tough time. And then we almost ran out of money in July 2019. We had $10,000 to $20,000 in the bank. And then I had to raise a convertible note of a secured convertible note and got $100,000 at a down round.

Wait. How brutal was that?

Like, down round, like it was a million and 1,000,000 valuation or what? No. It was from '21 down to 11. It was not great.

Interesting. So so Yeah. Who priced the 21,000,000? Techstars? Oh, no. The 3,000,000 seed?

The 3,000,000, it was between Next. View and Accompliscent. That's a wild story.

10 k left in the bank. Did you ever seriously consider shutting the company down?

No. So that one thing that I realized is I believe in when... In the in the darkest moment of my life, and I would say, Tive, the thing that kept me going is what I realized is I would start Tive again even if it went bankrupt. And that mindset came to me. Like, I was walking and running and all over Massachusetts trying to, like, just figure out what I'm gonna do.

Where do you see the future of your space going? I mean, can you build a brain for these trucks to tell them where to turn and how to drive and how to avoid weather? Shouldn't you just be running these transportation companies yourself? You have all the data.

Yeah. So this is where the world's going, and I think it's very exciting. We're really tracking what we're doing as you know. We're tracking the the the shipments on the trucks and a lot of shippers and customers know where these shipments are now. But the beauty is with artificial intelligence and finally with agents, I believe that autonomous supply chain is finally becoming something that's going to become a reality. When I started this company, you have these

visions in your head, like insights are gonna happen, automated things are gonna be calling, and people don't have to be on the phone calls and emails and spreadsheets. But now with agents, if you asked me seven months ago, I'd be like, I don't know. But after Opus came out in February, it's real. There is no doubt about that anymore. And where the world's going is, think of it this way, every package, every shipment, we will know

what's happening with it. It's gonna speak. AI agents are gonna know what actions to take based on those, whether it's email, whether it's phone call. They're gonna talk to other companies' agents and resolve any issues. Then finally, humans are going to just look at dashboards if there's any challenges that they need to meet and go and tackle, but otherwise agents are going to solve. Then at the end, the shipment's going to make it from point A

to point B autonomously, and the shipment's gonna make it on time and in full with full of coordination, and the world's gonna be a better place and more efficient than it is today. And that's why Are you actively we're really running any tests internally, like, to test

this vision, or are we still not there in terms of hardware or software agents or models or what?

Well, right now, we're actively... We've actively built workflows so that we can automatically do things so that... Actually, think of it as a shipment speaking, and then based on where it is and what's happening, there's workflows that based on milestones, those workflows trigger things. And the next step right now that we're doing is AI agents that make phone calls. And then based on that, then we're going to take other actions. It's part of the vision, but

I'm very confident that in six months, twelve months, especially in twenty four, thirty six months, we're gonna get to 2,030, I think, supply chains are there. And I believe Tive's gonna be the company that's gonna be the one that generates all

this supply So, what will your headline be if five years from now?

It's actually gonna change in around thirty to days or so, and time intelligence is gonna be a big piece there, which I'm sharing We don't have new info. Shared with anybody. So, yeah, so time intelligence is gonna be there, and that... That's gonna start being the headline.

Well, hey. Sorry. Take your time with your...

He's wrestling with the camera just because he

took this call last minute. He's in his brother's, I think, apartment or something or garage or something in New York. So, we appreciate it, Krenar. Great I just wanna follow your story as you as you bring this vision to life. Where can I find you online?

Tive.com and on LinkedIn.

Guys, what a story. Broke up a $100,000,000 of revenue today. Again, helping back to his father-in-law who he was charging $19 a month with a little thing in his back of his truck to track his truck back in 2015. First line of code, 2016, he put in a 100 k. By 2017, $3,000,000 seed round at a 20,000,000 valuation. First AE hired in 2018. By 2019, he got 30 trucks going around Massachusetts at 20, bucks a pop,

250 k of ARR. Fast forward a couple years to 2023. Right? They've got $29,000,000 of revenue. They end up doing a series c in '24 out of $40,000,000, and then fast forward again to today. Series c one in 2025, $20,000,000, $5,525,000,000 pre money, and about 67,000,000 of total revenue collected in 2025, but ending that year at an $89,000,000 run rate. Now at a $100,000,000 run rate, 300 folks as he's tries to figure out how do we

finally bring autonomous supply chain to the world en masse. He's doing it with all of his live trackers. He's growing with, 32 AEs, 11 SDRs, paid search, Google, LinkedIn, 1,300 customers, nine of which... This is crazy. Nine of which paying more than $1,000,000 per year. That's how you know he's building something valuable. Alright. Thank you for taking us to the top. You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.