Fleet AI Platform Motive Raises $1.3B+, Withdraws IPO Filing

Motive, the San Francisco startup that calls itself “the AI platform for physical operations,” has secured more than $1.3 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst‘s Customer Value Fund (CVF) — and used the war chest to walk away from its own IPO, at least for now.

What Motive does

Motive started in 2013 as an electronic logbook app for truck drivers, then expanded into vehicle and equipment tracking, AI-powered dash cams for driver safety, maintenance, and operations intelligence. The company, renamed from KeepTruckin in 2022, now serves nearly 100,000 customers across trucking and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, waste services and the public sector.

Motive said this was the strongest quarter in its history. Annual recurring revenue crossed $600 million, with growth accelerating to 30% year over year. ARR from customers spending more than $100,000 a year grew nearly 60% year over year, and net revenue retention for those accounts topped 120%.

Motive was co-founded in 2013 by CEO Shoaib Makani, Ryan Johns and Obaid Khan. Makani previously worked as an investor at Khosla Ventures, where he backed companies including Instacart and Yammer.

A non-dilutive check, and a shelved IPO

The financing comes from General Catalyst’s CVF, a non-dilutive structure that pre-funds a company’s sales and marketing spend and is repaid through a capped share of the revenue that spend generates — capital without new equity dilution. As part of the round, General Catalyst Managing Director Pranav Singhvi joined Motive’s board.

Motive plans to use the capital to deepen its AI platform — including newer products like Maintenance and Operations Intelligence — and to scale its go-to-market organization under Thomas Hansen, who joined as the company’s first President, Go-to-Market earlier this year after senior roles at Amplitude, UiPath, Dropbox and Microsoft.

With the new capital in hand, Motive withdrew the S-1 registration statement it had filed in December 2025 for a New York Stock Exchange listing under the ticker “MTVE,” for which J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Barclays and Jefferies had been named lead book-running managers. “With this financing, we’re very well capitalized. We withdrew our previously filed S-1,” said CEO Shoaib Makani. “But we remain very well positioned for the public markets in the future.”

“Motive is building the intelligence layer for the physical economy,” Makani said. “AI that can see what’s happening on the road and in the field, understand what matters, and take action. For our customers, that means preventing collisions, avoiding downtime, and eliminating manual work.”

CFO Chirag Shah said General Catalyst shared Motive’s long-term vision “from our earliest conversations,” adding that the financing lets the company “compound that for years to come through continued cutting-edge product innovation and scaling our go-to-market engine.” Singhvi called physical AI, and edge AI in particular, “one of the most compelling long-term opportunities we see today,” pointing to Motive’s “market-leading platform that puts AI to work in the field, on the road, and on the job site.”

Motive’s last disclosed valuation was $2.85 billion, set in a $150 million Series F round led by Insight Partners and Kleiner Perkins in 2022. This financing did not disclose a new valuation.

The competition: a two-horse telematics race

Motive’s closest rival is Samsara, which went public on the NYSE in December 2021 and now carries a market capitalization of roughly $21.9 billion on more than $1.6 billion in annual revenue. The two companies compete head-on in AI dash cams and fleet-management software — closely enough that Motive has sued Samsara over related AI dash cam and fleet-management technology. Verizon Connect, Geotab and Trimble also compete in commercial fleet telematics.

Centaur, a term coined by Bessemer Venture Partners, describes SaaS companies whose annual recurring revenue has passed $100 million — a growth milestone measured in real revenue, as opposed to a Unicorn’s valuation-based $1 billion threshold.