Alphabet-Backed Motive Walks Through the IPO Gate… Bears Reach for the Lock

“We’re done when I say we’re done…” -the IPO market to bears

Well would you look at that… another tech company just hit the walk-up song and pointed straight at the NYSE.

Fleet management software company Motive Technologies filed for a U.S. IPO this week under the ticker MTVE, officially putting itself on the “2026 exit liquidity hopefuls” board. And yes… once again, the deepest pool of capital magically turned out to be America. Wild how that keeps happening.

If the name rings a bell, that’s because Motive used to be called KeepTruckin before it went corporate-clean in 2022. Same company, nicer suit. So what the heck do they do? They provide AI-powered software and dashcams that help companies keep track of trucks, drivers, compliance rules, and everything else that usually ends with a clipboard, a lawsuit, or both.

(Source: Tech Republic)

Now unlike most of the IPOs of this year… on paper, the growth looks legit. Revenue climbed roughly 23% year over year, with Motive pulling in $327M over the first nine months of the year. That puts it firmly in the “real company” category.

But before you start practicing your bell-ringing form, there’s the other side of the ledger. Motive burned $138.5M over that same stretch, up from $113.9M last year. Growth costs money. AI costs money. Payroll definitely costs money.

And Motive employs a lot of people… 4,500+ employees, including 400 full-time data annotators whose entire job is teaching machines what “unsafe driving” looks like (and no, they don’t all live in Florida). 

According to CEO Shoaib Makani, those AI dashcams have prevented 170,000 collisions and saved 1,500 lives. That’s either incredible… or the most optimistic slide in the S-1. Either way, it plays well in front of regulators and enterprise buyers.

Backing the company is venture royalty… GV, Base10, Greenoaks, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Scale Venture Partners. Translation: this thing has been marinating in VC money for over a decade, and the fund managers would now like to be released.

Of course, no IPO story is complete without a little Judge Judy–style courtroom chaos. Motive is currently in patent litigation with rival Samsara, the publicly traded fleet tech giant sitting on a $22B market cap. Lawsuits don’t kill IPOs… but they definitely show up in the risk section in bold.

As for the customers, it’s no joke either… the big names include: Halliburton, Maersk, Komatsu, and NBCUniversal. They also have nearly 100,000 customers in total, mostly on subscription contracts, with hardware and services sprinkled on top. 

It’s a great IPO story… assuming the market cooperates. And right now, the bear-market chatter is heating up… which tends to turn IPO dreams into “let’s revisit this in 12 months.”

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Alphabet as mentioned in the article.