Defendant
1 case as defendant.
Masternaut Limited (trading since around 2020 as MICHELIN Connected Fleet) is a UK fleet-telematics company. Its registered office is at Priory Park, Great North Road, Aberford, Leeds LS25 3DF, England (Companies House no. 07848318). It was founded in 1996. Masternaut is a wholly owned subsidiary of Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin SCA (Euronext Paris: ML), which announced its acquisition in May 2019; the company's litigation disclosure statement identifies Masternaut Holdings Limited as corporate parent and Michelin as an affiliate. Before the Michelin deal, Masternaut was backed by Summit Partners and Corpay/FleetCor (which acquired it in 2014). Verified employee or revenue figures are not available from the sources reviewed; Michelin's acquisition release valued the deal at roughly 8x 2018 EBITDA and stated Masternaut managed over 220,000 vehicles, mostly light commercial.
Products / services. Masternaut provides SaaS-based telematics and mobile-resource-management software — vehicle tracking, fleet optimization, driver-behaviour monitoring, fuel and CO2 reduction, and predictive-maintenance/data-science services built on an in-vehicle IoT platform. Michelin's release says Masternaut operated primarily in France and the UK; its telematics businesses (Sascar, NexTraq, Masternaut) were consolidated under the Michelin Connected Fleet brand, which by Michelin's own account serves more than a million trucks and light commercial vehicles. Masternaut is an operating company, not a shell licensor.
Patent-litigation posture. Masternaut appears in the tracked data solely as a defendant (1 case, 0 as plaintiff), consistent with an operating company defending against an infringement suit rather than asserting patents. The single tracked case is Fleet Connect Solutions LLC v. Masternaut Limited d/b/a MICHELIN Connected Fleet, No. 2:25-cv-00351, filed April 2025 in the Eastern District of Texas (Marshall Division, Judges Gilstrap and Payne) — a plaintiff-friendly venue.
Context. Fleet Connect Solutions is characterized in other litigation (e.g., Platform Science's declaratory-judgment action) as a non-practicing entity owned and controlled by Empire IP LLC, having filed 50-plus infringement suits across many districts and targeting downstream fleet-telematics customers; Stanford's NPE database, Unified Patents, and RPX track it as an NPE asserting acquired patents. In the Masternaut case, Masternaut moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and for failure to state a claim (May 2025). The dispute reflects Fleet Connect's broader campaign against fleet-management and telematics providers.
Fleet Connect Solutions LLC asserted the '153 patent against Masternaut Limited in E.D. Tex. This is an unmarked portfolio campaign case; the narrative notes that '153 inclusion is likely but not confirmed in its sources. The case is open.