The network advantage: Building the industrial-grade Asset Tag

The Samsara Asset Tag is a Bluetooth-based tag that can be attached to almost anything in physical operations (a toolbox, a dumpster, a fiber splicer, airport ground equipment) with no cellular or GPS dependency. It relies on the density of the Samsara network, gateways and devices across all customer fleets, to catch its signal as they pass by.

David Gal, who leads Connected Equipment, joins our Chief Technology Officer John Bicket and Chief Product Officer Johan Land to talk about the Asset Tag on Object Stats. In this episode, he takes us behind the build of one of Samsara’s most ambitious hardware products and how the Asset Tag went from a late-night observation to one of the fastest growing products in Samsara's history.

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Here's what the Samsara network made possible:

1. The idea: A product born from a debugging session, not a roadmap

David's team was debugging the AG51 asset gateway, pulling device locations into Databricks to monitor performance when something suddenly “clicked” for David: this wasn't just a scatter plot of GPS points. It was a network, one dense enough that a Bluetooth device pinging from the side of a highway might realistically be heard by a Samsara-equipped vehicle passing at 70 mph. They'd already proven that Samsara's hardware could transmit Bluetooth at roughly 100 times the power of a consumer device, reaching over 1,000 feet in open air. Now, the two threads connected.

2. The test: Firmware hacks, highway overpasses, and a Reddit conspiracy theory

Rather than guess at the variables (advertising frequency, transmit power,network density, etc), the team ran the cheapest possible experiments first. They flashed existing AG firmware to simulate asset tag behavior, hid devices on highway overpasses, in bushes in the Bay Area, on Treasure Island, and at spots in Austin, then watched to see how many Samsara vehicles picked up the signal as they drove by. Funnily enough, one Austin device ended up on Reddit, with users debating whether it was a government surveillance tool or an Illuminati experiment.

In Databricks, they modeled network density: draw a 1,000-foot bounding box around a random device, count how many GPS traces passed through it, and calculate detection probability at different advertising intervals. The math needed to “math” before any new hardware was built.

3. The build: From scrappy prototypes to 100K units deployed in the field

The team didn't have a manufacturing partner until January of the year the product launched. Before that: 3D-printed enclosures, circuit boards assembled in-house, and a small batch of units hand-built right before the holidays. The first customer prototypes were spray-painted black. Some had no guts inside at all, just a plastic enclosure to test whether the form factor felt right. The first deployments were intentionally raw: no device naming or mobile activation. Just a dot on a map.

From there, the team moved fast on multiple fronts at once:

• Customer pilots: gave early units to a short list of customers and listened hard to what was missing

• Go-to-market: a "founders program" with a select number of salespeople pitching the product before it was finished

• Mobile: built a scrappy iOS app in a couple of days to prove the find-it experience would work, then handed it off properly

Theft recovery emerged as the killer use case. One large customer has recovered seven out of seven stolen assets using the AT11.

"There was a first-order problem that, if you could solve, would give you the privilege of solving additional problems later." — David

4. What's next: What a network this large starts to unlock

The most interesting moment in the episode is when David pulls a prototype out of his pocket: a small radar sensor that attaches to the top of a tank and measures how full it is. No cellular or GPS needed, just Bluetooth piggybacking on the Samsara network. Now that same infrastructure is becoming a platform for a completely new class of sensing:

• Tank levels: know when a tank needs refilling before it runs dry

• Utilization monitoring: track how often equipment is actually being used

• Environmental data: temperature, fill state, and more, flowing through the existing network at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems

The Asset Tag only exists because of the scale of Samsara's network. That's what makes building here different: the data, the density, and the infrastructure are already there. The opportunity is what you build on top of it—and at Beyond 2026, we unveiled even more products that build on that foundation to bring intelligence to the physical world.

Come build with us.