From Press Release Today: SaaS innovator’s $ 39M Series B combines with previously unannounced $ 11M Series A to scale on explosive growth. MaintainX frees industrial and front-line workers from clipboards and spreadsheets with digital tools that streamline safety and maintenance workflows for equipment and facilities.

Here: An interview between Brad Anderson, Editor in Chief of ReadWrite and Chris Turlica CEO of  MaintainX.

Tell me about your company (unique content) that nobody knows.

The entire team uses MaintainX to manage and run our entire company. We don’t use any other communications tools internally. This allows us to catch bugs because our team is “Customer Zero” for every new feature release.

Tell me about the founders?

MaintainX was founded in 2018 by Chris Turlica, Hugo Dozois-Caouette, Mathieu Marenge`re-Gosselin and Nick Haase. Fueled by a mutual desire to build a product that would help everyday people, we felt most connected to challenges faced by frontline workers in our own families. We recognized an opportunity to solve their most obvious pain point – eliminating clipboards and paper workflows.

Tell me about the people that funded your company?

Byron Deeter of Bessemer Ventures led the round and is joining the MaintainX board. New investors also include Vulcan Capital and the CEO and Head of Strategy at UiPath. All of our major former investors participated: Amity Ventures, August Capital, and Ridge Ventures.

Byron Deeter brings a wealth of experience through his prior investments in Procore and ServiceTitan. Additionally, he provides deep knowledge on bottoms-up product-led growth SaaS through his investments in Twilio, Intercom, Hashicorp, and Canva.

What will you do with the money?

With the capital, MaintainX will be in the best position to meet ongoing demand. We are accelerating our product roadmap, focusing on partnerships throughout the ecosystem, and growing our go-to-market and customer success functions. We are also hiring across our engineering, product, sales, and marketing teams.

What is your long-term vision of the company?

We are building a 360-degree work execution environment for frontline teams. Current market solutions focus on only one silo of data, such as maintenance, safety, or operations. MaintainX brings all this data together in one place while also making it real-time, collaborative, and actionable.

The business insights from our product enable unprecedented levels of efficiency from the ground floor to C-Suite. We believe MaintainX will be the platform of record for all equipment and facility-oriented work execution and the open-source system of record for operational workflows worldwide.

Tell me about why you started your company? Give me the full history.

How far back do you want me to go? I (Chris Turlica) am originally from Romania and grew up in a small town on the border of Ukraine. I received my Bachelors in Finance from McGill University in Canada. In my first years out of school, I worked in the buy-side of finance in Boston.

Then, I left to build a company in the chat platform space. I led the product for a software company that provides communication and shift management for hourly workers. This company was later acquired. During the acquisition period, I met David Hornik, who was a member of their board. David led MaintainX’s series seed and series A rounds and is currently on our board.

During my time at this company and my experience being on the growth equity team at Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, I discovered a massively underserved market that was not realizing the benefits of the digital revolution. Industrial frontline workers didn’t have the tools they deserve to be the most effective at managing their equipment and facilities.

This inspired me to create MaintainX with my co-founders.

Give me 2-3 quotes about the future of your industry and how you feel you are revolutionizing it?

We are at an inflection point in America in industrial manufacturing. COVID has taken manufacturing and industrial environments on a fast track to digitization out of necessity. We are excited to be at the forefront of bringing the digital revolution to frontline workers who are the backbone of our economy.

Frontline workers aren’t that different than ‘traditional’ knowledge workers. They are extremely competent and need to be empowered the same way knowledge-workers are. They are the backbone of our country and instrumental in manufacturing and operational know-how and efficiency.

What makes me the most excited about MaintainX is providing the frontline workforce with a product that allows them to perform to their best ability without wasted efforts. They already are knowledge workers; let’s give them the best-in-class tools.

Image Credit: mentatdgt; pexels; thank you!