Thereafter, Calisto got a taste of the corporate world while participating in an accelerated training programme with Standard Bank from 1986 to 1991. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He started his own business with about R100 in 1994, working as a distributor of telematics devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Among his initial customers was Netstar, who would later become the biggest rival to his own business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Launched in 2001, Cartrack was initially a joint venture with Netstar. The arrangement did not work out, in part due to different views on international expansions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2004, Cartrack was spun off into a standalone firm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Calisto said it was very difficult to break into the market in the early years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To sell their technology, vehicle tracking companies had to be accredited by the Motor Vehicle Security Association of South Africa (VESA).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Membership required 3,000 subscribers and 100 recoveries, something an upstart could not offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cartrack and VESA came to a compromise. Cartrack gave a financial guarantee that it would meet those thresholds within a certain time or refund customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cartrack saw substantial subscriber and revenue growth and expanded into various countries in the years that followed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2014, its venture into the Asian market made the company realise it would need to list to show foreign authorities it was a credible business. Cartrack listed on the JSE in 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, a move in headquarters to Singapore and increased focus on markets outside South Africa saw Cartrack delisting from the burse in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He relisted on the Nasdaq under a new holding company Karooooo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two decades after leaving the Netstar nest, Karoooo had amassed nearly 2.2 million subscribers in 24 countries and was employing over 2,500 staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Its customer count was also greater than Altron Netstar’s 1.9 million subscribers in 2024. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition, Karooooo generated around R3.84 billion in revenue \u2014 50% more than Netstar \u2014 in its last financial year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Calisto believes that continuous innovation and improvements in Cartrack’s technology were key to its explosive growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Technology is like a garden \u2014 you never stop working on it,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We’ve evolved a lot since 2004. What we’re doing today with our technology has nothing to do with what we initially started out with.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n “Our technology is not only about recovering a vehicle or performing analytics on the vehicle’s data, but it’s also become about analytics on the driver and helping businesses deliver good services to their customers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Karooooo’s unusual name has an interesting background. It was born out of Calisto’s deep love for the Karoo region in South Africa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The extra o’s were necessary because the company wanted to have a domain that matched its name and the US owner of karoo.com would only sell the domain for a few million dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company figured that the additional o’s would not affect pronunciation and bought the domains for “Karoo” with three to ten o’s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That way, customers unsure about the number of o’s could mistype and still end up on the correct website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time of publication, typing in four, six, or seven o’s redirected to the company’s actual website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zak Calisto went from a small-time telematics distributor to founding Cartrack, later renamed Karooooo, which has grown to a multi-national telematics giant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":544841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[58758,66088,69535,42988,98518,69533],"class_list":["post-579186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-car-tracking","tag-cartrack","tag-karooooo","tag-vehicle-tracking","tag-vehicle-tracking-companies","tag-zak-calisto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579186"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":580403,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579186\/revisions\/580403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Zak-Calisto.jpg\")