The Story of Tive: The Company Building the Future of Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility

The Story of Tive: The Company Building the Future of Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility

The best startup ideas don’t come from market research or trend analysis. They come from annoyance. For Krenar Komoni, that annoyance arrived during family dinners at his father-in-law’s house, where every meal was interrupted by frantic phone calls about missing truck drivers.

“Every time I would go to his house, he would be on the phone trying to figure out where his truck drivers are,” Krenar recalls. “And I got pretty tired of it because I was trying to have dinner with him, trying to drink a glass of wine, and he’s getting up at 10:00 PM, 09:00 PM calling drivers.”

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Krenar shared the story of how that dinner-table frustration became Tive, a supply chain visibility platform that’s raised $80 million, shipped over 1.5 million trackers, and is now preparing for an eventual IPO.

From Kosovo to Silicon Valley Engineering

Krenar’s entrepreneurial instincts formed early. “I always been an entrepreneur. Turns out, since I was 14 years old, I just realized I wanted to play around code, start companies, try, do different things,” he shares. Growing up in Kosovo, he watched his mother run businesses and thought to himself that this was how he wanted to live.

At 17, Krenar came to the United States through an exchange student program, landing in Boston with Hollywood expectations. His friend Jonathan picked him up and drove him to Northfield, Vermont. “I’m like, he’s like, this is the town. This is it. I’m like, it’s one pizzeria, one bank, one laundromat, one chinese restaurant. I’m like, what is this? Is this America?” Krenar remembers.

That small Vermont town was just the beginning. Krenar studied computer engineering and math at Norwich University, then earned his master’s in electrical engineering at Tufts. His career in wireless technology took him to Bitwave Semiconductor, where he helped build software-defined radio on a chip, and then to an MIT startup as the first employee building efficient base stations for cell towers.

“I’ve always worked for startups, Brett. I’ve never worked for a big company ever in my life. And I just have that startup bug since I was a kid,” Krenar says.

The Side Project That Became a Business

The GPS tracker Krenar built for his father-in-law’s trucking company was meant to be a fun weekend project—”make a GPS tracker for fun. Put in your trucks, and then I’ll make a little app using PHP and MySQL on the phone, and you can see where the truck drivers are. And that’s how it started.”

Word spread. His father-in-law’s friends wanted trackers too. Soon Krenar was tracking 30 to 40 trucks. But he quickly realized the truck tracking market was crowded. The real innovation came from an unlikely source: a truck driver named Tony who was hauling lobster and scallops.

“Every time he would move, he would, they would put this temperature sensor on top of these pallets. And I asked him, how did this temperature sensor work? And he was like, well, at the end of the shipment, somebody takes a look at it, and he gave me one. I’m like, that’s crazy. Like, we need, this is 2015. We got to figure out how to make things real time,” Krenar explains.

He searched Google for GPS trackers with batteries that could provide real-time data. Everything he found looked like it was designed in the Windows 98 era. “I’m like, I’m naive. I’m going to start this company. And that’s how it all started.”

The Near-Death Experience

By 2018, Tive had built what Krenar believed was the world’s best tracker. It had over a year of battery life, cost $250 with a $50 monthly subscription, and attracted customers like Nokia. But there was a fatal flaw: customers had to return the devices.

“The challenge was they couldn’t use it a lot because they had to figure out how to, they would ship their products, could be pharmaceuticals, could be produce, could be one of my first customers was Nokia, but then they would have to return these trackers back,” Krenar explains. The reverse logistics killed adoption.

With only three months of runway remaining, Krenar faced the hardest decision of his entrepreneurial life. “In order to extend it to nine, I had to go and lay off half of the company. And I did that,” he says.

Those six extra months bought something more valuable than time—they bought a chance to learn. Krenar and a small team of college graduates started cold calling and cold emailing 150 to 200 potential customers every single week. “Email, cold call, email, cold call, change messaging, change the subject line, change how we write things and just try and try,” he recalls.

The feedback revealed the path forward: customers needed disposable, single-use trackers. To make the economics work, Krenar and his VP of technology flew to China and visited eight manufacturing sites. They needed to build trackers they could sell for $40-60 while making money on the first sale. “I couldn’t afford that because I had no money left. So I had to make money first, like over the first sale,” Krenar notes.

Finding Product-Market Fit

By January 2020, just before COVID-19 transformed global awareness of supply chains, Tive released the world’s first single-use 5G-ready tracker. “I would say we hit product market fit with that because customers were using these single use trackers that go on shipments, but they were 2G, like GSM. And 2G was phasing out,” Krenar explains.

The early customer base surprised him. Krenar had assumed pharmaceutical companies would line up immediately, but the regulatory requirements—CFR 21 Part 11 compliance, data integrity validation, reliable temperature logging—created barriers too high for an early-stage startup.

Instead, Tive found traction in produce. “They want to make sure that those strawberries, those blueberries, that poultry, chicken, turkey meat, bananas, asparagus, they want to make sure that those arrive in good condition at the retail store. And temperature is very important for those, but they also want to do it very cost effectively. And that’s where we really started to see some strides in the beginning,” he shares.

The persona was equally surprising. Krenar thought VPs of supply chain would be his buyers. Instead, “We kept getting directed towards logistics managers, transportation managers, people that are actually doing the work of moving the goods from a to b. And that’s how we figured out as far as the persona goes.”

Building Trust Through Transparency

As Tive scaled, Krenar developed a marketing philosophy centered on two emotions: love and trust. “I want our customers to love our brand. And number two, I want the customers to trust our brand,” he explains. But he recognized the challenge: “Somebody can love the brand, but they might not trust it because the product’s not good. So it’s a lot of, we have to do both at the same time.”

Trust comes from radical transparency, especially during failures. “If there’s been a challenge in the market or we run into an issue, I’ve trained the team and I’ve done it myself, to immediately call the customer, email the customer, apologize to the customer, tell them about the issue before they figure out the issue. And I think that builds more trust than anything else, especially when things are not going well,” Krenar says.

The Road to $200 Million and Beyond

Today, Tive has 205 employees, with 80 based in Krenar’s home country of Kosovo. The company has shipped more than 1.5 million trackers tracking everything from strawberries to rocket parts across 700 customers. This year, they’re targeting 750,000 to one million tracker sales.

Looking three to five years ahead, Krenar sees a clear path: “I believe that we’re going to be a fairly large company, somewhere in the 200 plus million dollar range on revenue, maybe even more. And the goal is to prepare ourselves to go public, and I’m very confident that we’re going to achieve that.”

The key to reaching that goal? Continued innovation. “There’s plateaus on every single product in the world. Even the 2G plateaued. Right. There’s now you have to release the now we released a newer, lower cost tracker, and then there’s a new tracker that we’re releasing on life sciences to go after another vertical,” Krenar explains. “The biggest thing that we need to do right, is execute on the product roadmap and keep innovating there so that we can capture more and more of the market share. The market’s there. I know that for a fact. It’s execution.”

From a dinner-table annoyance to 1.5 million trackers shipped, Tive’s story proves that the best businesses often start with the simplest observations about everyday friction. Sometimes all it takes is watching someone interrupt their dinner one too many times to realize there’s a better way.