Walk into any parcel hub, aircraft plant or brewery and you will find thousands of objects that matter enormously and say nothing. Roll cages. Pallets. Trolleys. Tank containers. Returnable crates. None of them has an engine, a battery bank or a power cable. They move from site to site, sit in corners, get borrowed, get lost, and are replaced at considerable cost when nobody can find them.
For most of the history of industrial logistics, the only way to know where these things were was to go and look. Barcodes and clipboards helped with counting, but not with finding. Fleet telematics solved the problem for trucks years ago, because a truck has a battery and an alternator to run a tracker. A steel cage on wheels does not.
That gap is where Sensolus lives. The Belgian company, founded in Ghent in 2013, builds battery-powered trackers and a cloud platform for what the industry calls non-powered assets. It is not a household name, and it is not trying to be. But over the past few weeks it has been unusually busy: a new aerospace deployment in Canada, a hazardous-environment tracker previewed at one of Europe's largest transport trade fairs, and a steady push into North America that started with an Atlanta office in 2023.
This profile looks at what Sensolus actually does, how it got here, and what its recent announcements say about where asset tracking is heading.
A Company Built Around One Unglamorous Problem
Sensolus was started by four IoT engineers in 2013, at a time when low-power wide-area networks were just becoming commercially available. The timing mattered. Before networks such as Sigfox, LoRaWAN and later NB-IoT and LTE-M, putting a connected tracker on a pallet made little sense. Cellular modules drained batteries in weeks, and the hardware cost more than many of the assets it was meant to watch.
Low-power networks changed the arithmetic. A small device that wakes up occasionally, sends a few bytes and goes back to sleep can run for years on a single battery. That made it realistic, for the first time, to fit trackers to large fleets of cheap, unpowered equipment and leave them alone.
The company's early growth came mainly from European industrial customers. By October 2020, when it raised €3.5 million in a round led by btov Partners' Industrial Technologies Fund, Sensolus said it had around 30 employees and more than 100,000 non-powered assets connected to its platform. Customers named at the time included Airbus, Volvo, AB InBev and SUEZ. Co-founder and CEO Kristoff Van Rattinghe summed up the thesis in the funding announcement: IoT, he said, had become "mature and sufficiently affordable" to connect boxes and pallets directly.
Six years later, the company describes itself as having more than one million connected assets, over 500 customers and more than 60 partners. It keeps its global headquarters in Ghent and runs its North American business from Atlanta, Georgia.
The DHL Deployment That Defined Its Scale
If one project explains Sensolus's position in the market, it is the work with Deutsche Post DHL in Germany.
Deutsche Post and DHL move an extraordinary volume through their German network. According to the Sensolus case study on the DHL rollout, the group operates 119 processing centres in the country, 38 for parcels and 81 for mail. On a normal day the parcel network handles six to seven million items, rising to around 11 million at peak times such as Black Friday and Christmas. Around 41 million letters pass through each day.
All of that moves in rolling cages and letter trolleys. When volumes swing, the question of where those cages are, and how many are sitting idle at the wrong centre, becomes a real operational constraint.
The rollout began in 2019 with more than 250,000 rolling cages fitted with trackers. After the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when parcel volumes jumped, the programme was expanded to include around 100,000 letter trolleys. Today the case study puts the total at nearly one million trackers, covering roughly 450,000 parcel cages and 400,000 letter trolleys.
The hardware for this deployment comes from Alps Alpine Europe, while Sensolus supplies the cloud platform that turns raw location pings into something planners can use, connected to DHL's own systems through an open API. That split is worth noting. Sensolus is often described as a tracker company, but in its largest reference project its role is primarily software and data.
The DHL story also shows how quickly the network layer underneath these deployments can shift. The original trackers ran on Sigfox, which offered long battery life and low cost. Sigfox went through insolvency proceedings in 2022 before being taken over by UnaBiz, and since 2024 DHL has deployed around 50,000 newer NB-IoT trackers alongside the older units. For customers, that is a reminder that a tracking programme expected to run for a decade will probably outlive at least one connectivity standard.
Delia Henning, a parcel centre operations expert quoted in the case study, put the operational dependence bluntly: "Without rolling cages tracking, this would simply be unattainable today."
What Sensolus Actually Sells
Strip away the marketing language and Sensolus offers three things: trackers, a platform, and the integration work that connects the two to a customer's existing systems.
The Trackers
The company's current flagship device is the TRACK 1105. When it was launched for the US, Canada and Mexico in September 2025, Sensolus described it as a dual-network device using both NB-IoT and LTE-M, the two low-power cellular standards now widely deployed by mobile operators. Running on both gives some redundancy: if one network is weak at a particular site, the other may still get a message through.
The device carries IP68 and IP69K ratings, meaning it is designed to survive immersion and high-pressure, high-temperature washdowns. That is less exotic than it sounds. Reusable crates in food and beverage supply chains are routinely pressure-washed, and a tracker that fails after a few cycles is useless. The company quotes a battery life of up to seven years, which in practice depends on how often a device is asked to report.
Sensolus trackers also combine several ways of working out where they are: satellite positioning outdoors, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-based location indoors, where satellite signals are poor. The company says the TRACK 1105 switches between indoor and outdoor modes automatically, without manual setup. For an asset that spends half its life in a warehouse and half on a trailer, that matters more than raw accuracy in any single mode.
Sensolus's wider hardware range also includes multi-sensor devices and gateways, and its trackers carry condition sensors alongside location. In the DHL project, for example, tilt sensors on newer trackers show whether a cage is in use or simply parked.
The Platform
The software side is where most of the day-to-day value sits. The Sensolus platform maps assets, sets up geofences, and flags events such as an asset being delivered to the wrong location or staying too long at a customer site. Dashboards and a mobile app sit on top, and an API lets larger customers pipe the data into ERP, warehouse or planning systems.
More recently, the company has started talking about an AI layer on top of that data, allowing users to ask questions in plain language rather than building reports. It is an obvious direction for any data platform in 2026. How much it changes daily work for a logistics planner is something customers will judge over time.
The Customers
Beyond DHL, Sensolus lists customers including Airbus, AB InBev, Vaillant, MTU Aero Engines and Condor Technik. Its sector focus spans aerospace, equipment manufacturing, transport and logistics, airport ground services, waste and recycling, and construction. The common thread is not the industry but the asset: things that are valuable in aggregate, cheap individually, and constantly on the move.
The Recent Buzz
Three developments have put Sensolus back in the trade press in 2025 and 2026.
Pratt & Whitney Canada
On 22 September 2026, Sensolus and systems integrator Gemba Systems announced a deployment at Pratt & Whitney Canada's Montreal operations. The project fits Sensolus trackers to the trolleys that carry materials around the shop floor.
On paper it is a modest use case. In an aerospace plant, it is not. Engine manufacturing is heavily regulated, parts traceability is strict, and just-in-time delivery between assembly areas depends on knowing where material is. Before the project, finding trolleys was a manual job. The announcement says the system is meant to remove that search time, improve traceability and support just-in-time flows between assembly sites.
The deal also illustrates how Sensolus reaches the market. Gemba Systems is an Industry 4.0 integrator working with RTLS, RFID and IoT tracking. Its chief executive, Stijn Van de Velde, described his firm's role as matching "the right technology to what's actually happening on the floor" and making it work end to end. Steve Logue, Sensolus's general manager, framed it the same way: successful Industry 4.0 initiatives, he said, "are built on strong partnerships."
The announcement does not say how many trackers are involved, and no performance figures have been published yet. For now it is best read as a reference win in a demanding sector rather than evidence of measured results.
IAA Transportation 2026 and the TRACK 1105 EX
A week earlier, Sensolus used IAA Transportation 2026 in Hanover to preview a new variant of its flagship tracker, the TRACK 1105 EX.
The EX model is designed for explosive atmospheres. Sensolus says it is intended for ATEX and IECEx certification, the European and international schemes for equipment used where flammable gas or dust may be present, and targets Zone 1 gas and Zone 21 dust environments. These are areas where an explosive atmosphere is likely to occur during normal operation, so the bar for electronics is high.
The intended uses are specific: tank containers, hazardous waste containers, chemical and pharmaceutical facilities, and automotive paint spray areas. These are all places where standard trackers cannot legally be used, and where the assets are often more expensive and more tightly regulated than a roll cage. Sensolus has said the EX model is planned for early 2027.
At the same show, the company shared its own figures on why customers invest. Sensolus estimates that three to five per cent of non-powered equipment is misplaced or lost each year, that better visibility can raise asset utilisation by up to 20 per cent, and that projects typically pay back in 18 months to two and a half years. These are vendor estimates, and results will vary widely by fleet size, asset value and how disciplined a customer already is. But they give a sense of the business case the company is making to buyers.
The North American Push
The third thread is geography. Sensolus opened its first North American office in Atlanta in 2023 and, in September 2025, launched the TRACK 1105 for the US, Canada and Mexico. Its North American business is led by Steve Logue, who described the device at launch as building on "more than 10 years of R&D."
Earlier in 2025, the company announced a partnership with RaceTrac, the convenience store and fuel retailer with more than 590 locations. RaceTrac uses Sensolus trackers on reusable totes carrying spare parts for fuel pumps between stores and distribution centres. It is a neat example of the category: a plastic tote is cheap, but a fuel pump out of action at a 24-hour site is not. Daniel Vasseur, RaceTrac's executive director of supply chain merchandise, said at the time that properly functioning pumps are "essential to our 24/7 business."
Taken together, the Atlanta office, the regional launch, RaceTrac and now Pratt & Whitney Canada suggest a company trying to repeat in North America what it built in Europe: a base of large industrial references, reached largely through integrators and partners.
Why Non-Powered Asset Tracking Is Getting Attention
Sensolus is one company in a much larger shift. For years, IoT asset tracking focused on high-value, powered equipment: trucks, generators, construction machinery. The next wave is about volume, not value per unit.
Three trends are driving it.
First, low-power cellular has matured. NB-IoT and LTE-M are now supported by major operators in most industrial markets, which reduces dependence on proprietary networks and makes long-term planning easier. DHL's gradual move from Sigfox to NB-IoT trackers is a case in point.
Second, reusable packaging is growing. Circular supply chains depend on crates, pallets and containers coming back. Every unit that goes missing has to be replaced, which cuts into the economic and environmental case for reuse. Tracking is increasingly seen as part of making reusable systems work at all.
Third, the data is becoming more useful than the dot on the map. Early projects were about finding lost items. Mature ones, like DHL's, are about capacity planning: knowing how many cages are at each centre, how long they sit idle, and where to send them before a peak. That shifts the value from hardware to software, which is where Sensolus has put much of its emphasis.
The Challenges Ahead
None of this makes the market easy.
Asset tracking is crowded. Sensolus competes with cellular tracker makers, RFID and RTLS specialists, and fleet telematics platforms that are pushing down into trailers and containers. Many large customers run tenders where hardware price per unit matters a great deal, and margins on devices are thin.
Connectivity remains a moving target. Customers want trackers that last seven to ten years, but networks evolve faster than that. The Sigfox episode showed how an established technology can become uncertain within a few years. Supporting several network options, as the TRACK 1105 does, reduces that risk but does not remove it.
Scale also brings its own work. Managing one million devices means handling battery replacements, firmware updates, network changes and data quality across hundreds of customers. For a company of Sensolus's size, the operational side of running a large installed base is as demanding as selling new projects.
Finally, the headline benefits of tracking depend on what customers do with the data. A dashboard showing where every pallet is has limited value if nobody changes how pallets are managed. The most successful deployments, including DHL's, tie tracking directly into planning processes. Replicating that level of integration with every new customer is slow, partner-heavy work.
What To Watch
For anyone following industrial IoT, a few things will show how far Sensolus's current momentum carries.
The first is the TRACK 1105 EX. Certification for hazardous areas is demanding, and the planned early 2027 timing will show whether the company can open up chemical, pharmaceutical and hazardous waste logistics as a serious new segment.
The second is North America. Pratt & Whitney Canada and RaceTrac are credible references, but the region is large and competitive. Whether Sensolus can build a customer base there comparable to its European one will likely depend on its integrator partnerships.
The third is the software story. As trackers become more standardised, the platform, the integrations and the AI-assisted analysis layer will increasingly decide which vendors customers stay with.
Sensolus has spent more than a decade on a problem most people never think about. Its recent announcements do not change the nature of that work. They show a company trying to take a proven European model into harder environments and new regions, one trolley, cage and tank container at a time.
