1978–1998 Trimble Inc. was founded as Trimble Navigation in November 1978 by Charles Trimble and two engineers from
Hewlett-Packard. The company originally operated out of
Los Altos, California. One of the company's first moves was to acquire the rights to a
Loran-C navigation technology that Hewlett-Packard had stopped developing. Trimble bought the technology for $50,000. That same year, Trimble began selling
GPS-enabled personal position finders to the U.S. military. Following the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, U.S. military demand for these finders increased significantly and Trimble's sales revenues grew from approximately $5 million per month to $19 million per month. Steve Berglund, who was previously president of Spectra Precision, took over as CEO in 1999. In May 2000, Trimble announced that it was acquiring Spectra Precision. The acquisition allowed Trimble to integrate Spectra's software development team and
virtual reference station technology into its business. By 2003, Trimble had started selling a combination GPS and laser grade control system for earthworks equipment, to help farmers level land and control water drainage. By March 2004, Trimble had acquired and integrated the staff and technology of the
3D laser scanning company MENSI. Between 1999 and 2007, Trimble's annual revenues grew from $270 million to approximately $1 billion. By 2008, it employed approximately 3,400 people in 18 countries. In May 2011, Trimble announced that it would be acquiring Tekla, a Finnish firm specializing in
building information modeling (BIM) software. The acquisition was completed later that year. The following January, Trimble announced that it would purchase StruCad and StruEngineer from AceCad Software in order to expand the capabilities of Tekla's BIM software. Trimble acquired the
3D modeling software package
SketchUp from Google in 2012 and acquired
TMW Systems the same year. In 2016, Trimble further built out its
design-build-operate portfolio by acquiring the building design software company
Sefaira. In April 2018, Trimble agreed to acquire the construction software company Viewpoint from investment firm
Bain Capital in an all-cash $1.2 billion transaction.
2019–present In October 2019, Trimble announced that Robert G. Painter would become the company's president and CEO, effective January 4, 2020. In November 2020, the firm signed an agreement with
Boston Dynamics to integrate construction data collection technologies into BD's robotic dog
Spot. In December 2021, Trimble purchased AgileAssets, a
SaaS company helping corporate and governmental clients manage infrastructure assets. AgileAssets was absorbed into the buildings and infrastructure segment of Trimble's business. In September 2022, Trimble acquired B2W Software, a New Hampshire-based developer of software for the heavy civil construction industry. The following month, Trimble announced its headquarters had relocated to
Westminster, Colorado from Sunnyvale, California. In December 2022, Trimble acquired the transportation management platform Transporeon in order to strengthen its existing transportation management systems offerings. In September 2023,
AGCO announced that it would acquire an 85% stake in Trimble's agriculture business. This acquisition created a new joint venture called PTx Trimble. In March 2024, Trimble joined the
Alliance of OpenUSD. That same month, the company announced that it would be partnering with
Nvidia to provide model data for
Nvidia Omniverse RTX viewers. In May 2024, Trimble acquired Flashtract, a company specializing in payment, compliance, and documentation exchange. Trimble subsequently rebranded Flashtract's technology as Trimble Pay. In September 2024, Trimble announced that it would be selling its transportation telematics business to Platform Science in exchange for a 32.5% stake in Platform Science.{{cite news |author= |date=September 15, 2024 |title=Platform Science to acquire Trimble’s global transportation telematics business units 2025,
BIEC ==Products and services==