Entrepreneurship at Cornell has announced that John Bicket ’02, chief technology officer and co-founder of tech firm Samsara, has been named Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year 2025. He will be honored on campus April 10-11 at the Entrepreneurship at Cornell Celebration Ezra Event.

Samsara offers an AI-powered platform to help physical operations organizations improve their safety, efficiency and sustainability by using data from sensors and connected devices.

“We have been building Samsara over the past decade to transform how our customers operate, and this award is an awesome validation of our mission,” Bicket said. “I’m thankful to work alongside our customers, learning from them and building technology that makes a real-world impact at scale.”

Prior to co-founding Samsara, Bicket co-founded Meraki, where he was CTO and vice president of engineering. At Meraki, he built a cloud-based platform combining analytics, big data and security to help customers deploy and manage enterprise networks.

Bicket started Meraki out of his doctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Meraki’s platform scaled to connect millions of network devices across more than 140 countries. Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion in 2012.

Bicket earned his bachelor’s in computer science from Cornell and a master’s in computer science from MIT.

“I’m grateful for my experience at Cornell,” he said. “It was a formative experience and it has attributed so much to my entrepreneurial journey. I love being a part of this community and am so appreciative of this recognition.”

The Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year award is given by Entrepreneurship at Cornell to a Cornellian who exemplifies entrepreneurial achievement, impact on humanity and an inspirational story or business outcome.

Kathy Hovis is a writer for Entrepreneurship at Cornell.