AI, EVs and the supply chain crisis have lifted a family-owned company in Ontario close to unicorn status. 

While many small businesses are struggling to maintain momentum in the EV technology space, Geotab established a steady, slow-growing business before benefitting from recent trends. The firm has helped large-vehicle fleets track data for a quarter-century. As of December, it was on track for $970 million in 2024 revenue. 

The company remains privately held and employee-owned, with no outside investors. CEO Neil Cawse is less focused on jacking up short-term revenues than making successful long-term bets. Yet Geotab is surely one of the country’s under-celebrated success stories having surpassed the “unicorn” valuation mark of $1 billion. It’s a marked difference from many of the automotive tech firms that went public over the last few years, wooed by special-purpose acquisition company deals that have since pressured growing companies to hit profit and production milestones.

That’s not to say Geotab’s past few years haven’t been a wild ride. The company was started in 2000 by Cawse and his siblings, who immigrated from South Africa to Oakville, Ont. Back then, fleet management software was limited to tools like USB keys, and the Cawse family ran Geotab out of a basement. 

They had some early wins, creating tools for big firms like UPS with no guarantee they’d get paying contracts out of it—though they did. But the still-new telematics industry was going through growing pains, developing a reputation for misuse by companies surveilling their drivers. 

Nonetheless, Geotab bootstrapped its way along, building tools to track snowplows or vehicles used in industries like mining and construction. 

Then, between 2018 and 2020, its one million-strong subscriber base doubled. Big data and cloud computing were going mainstream. The COVID-19 pandemic was supercharging companies’ interest in e-commerce delivery trucks and supply-chain tracking software. At the same time, slews of companies set net zero pledges that required them to track emissions. Geotab’s subscribers have since doubled again, to more than four million.

The tough part may be yet to come, though, as hot new AI companies crowd the field. Other Canadian companies like Lion Electric, which made electrified e-commerce vehicles, and Kinaxis, which makes AI software for supply chain tracking, have struggled to maintain the support of investors. 

Still, Geotab sees advantage in being a relative grey-beard in a new field—especially in automotive, where safety and reliability are key. Mike Branch, the firm’s vice-president of data and analytics, said that he was granted ample time to experiment with data and AI before commercializing products. He also had latitude to hire privacy experts early in the development journey. Both approaches have served the company well, Branch said. 

Cawse said the company won’t hesitate to refer or turn away business if it’s a poor fit. And when a customer identifies a problem, he doesn’t charge to fix it. Instead, Geotab looks for new ways to use the IP it generates in devising the solution, he said. 

“We love problems,” he added. “You can’t know what you don’t know. You can’t see around the corner. So you’ve got to go into the data … I think every business should be thinking about that progression.” 

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Correction: This story has been updated to report Geotab’s revenue in Canadian dollars.