UpKeep Raises $36 Million to Advance Mobile Capabilities of Facilities, Maintenance Teams

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UpKeep announced last month that they raised a $36 million Series B round of funding. This influx of cash will enable the startup to better help industrial facilities and maintenance teams work with mobile technology.  

Based in Los Angeles, UpKeep provides mobile-first CMMS software for maintenance and facilities collaboration, helping teams increase their productivity. The financing round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from investors Battery Ventures, Emergence Capital, FundersClub, Mucker Capital, and Y Combinator. According to PitchBook data, UpKeep had a value of $40 million in 2018.

We spoke with UpKeep founder and CEO Ryan Chan about how the company is advancing industry, what his research is showing about trends coming out of COVID-19, and how they’ll use the money they raised.

A Manufacturing Insider’s Passion Project

“I graduated from Cal Berkeley [with a degree in] chemical engineering," Chan said. "My first job out of college was working in a manufacturing plant; It was spun out of DuPont Chemicals. We manufactured reverse osmosis membranes from brackish water, a little bit of desalination, water purification.”

Every day on the job as a process engineer, Chan contemplated how to speed up the manufacturing line, even just incrementally.

After only a short time at the company, Chan pivoted his focus from accelerating the manufacturing line to reducing its downtime. He soon realized that reducing downtime by 10% actually gave them the same net outcome that they’d been trying to achieve through expediting the manufacturing line. In fact, it seemed to have an even more significant impact.

“So we searched high and low for better software out there to help track and reduce downtime of our equipment,” said Chan. But all the platforms they found were desktop-focused.

As Chan explained, “The team, the production floor, the maintenance team, the facility staff, the operators never sit in front of a desktop.” The very people who needed to use the software most were often onsite at plants and facilities, not at their desks in front of a computer. 

Having to rely on desktop-focused software meant increasing work tasks and decreasing efficiency. Workers would have to jot down notes while they were on the floor to later input into the software instead of doing it in real-time.

“At the tail end of their day, they have to come back to the office and retype all of their notes,” said Chan. It was a formula that could lead to potential inputting errors.

“Aren't we supposed to utilize technology to make our jobs easier?” asked Chan.

That's where his idea for UpKeep was born.

He began teaching himself how to code, building the software on nights and weekends. He was doing it for fun, and he took a leap of faith and quit his job to work on it full-time.

“I wound up building this mobile-first product that was built for my old company,” he said. With this new technology, he explained, “all of our technicians [could] do their job from standing right next to that piece of equipment without having to come back to the office.”

Chan originally built UpKeep for the manufacturing industry because that’s where he’d been working. When he put it out on the mobile app stores, though, people outside the industrial sector began using it.

“What we found was so many different industries started using it, from oil and gas to wastewater treatment plants," Chan explained. "It was kind of bizarre the level and breadth that we have with different industries.”

What Sets UpKeep Apart from Competitors

Chan founded UpKeep in 2014, explaining, “This company was started from a personal pain point. It wasn't started from seeing a market opportunity.”

Now it’s a team of more than 100 people around the world who help make maintenance software easier for teams to use.

“We always [consider], what is our core value prop from an ROI perspective?” said Chan. He said that ultimately it comes down to “reducing downtime, extending asset lifetime, and ultimately improving productivity for the entire production team.”

Maintenance and operations teams that utilize mobile CMMS software have better consistency and exchange of information, which results in an astounding 652% return on investment. UpKeep enables real-time notifications for teams so they can resolve critical issues efficiently.

A few UpKeep case studies illustrate the significant ROI across a variety of industries and use cases. Chan told Thomas Insights about one in which every minute of downtime at a customer’s automotive manufacturing plant cost them around $22,000 — with UpKeep, they reduced downtime by 26%. 

What sets UpKeep apart from its competitors is that they’re not focused on fancy “bells and whistles” that don’t add any real value. Rather, they keep in mind that the end-users — the operators, the production teams, the technicians — are looking to input high-quality data to provide reports and updates to their managers and that what they really want is an easy mobile-first experience.    

“You come to us because we've dedicated an entire customer team to our customers [and] getting to know their industries,” said Chan. UpKeep works to serve as partners to their customers by “streamlining and helping their business get better.”

And Chan isn’t someone who gets complacent: “We want to continue pushing this space and fueling innovation for the maintenance, reliability, manufacturing spaces.”

Along Came COVID-19

The Impact of the Pandemic Isn’t Universal 

Chan recently participated in a webinar on the trends UpKeep has been tracking related to the COVID-19 pandemic. He said, “We notice that there are some industries just absolutely broken, and there are some industries that are thriving.”

As he explains, the impact is disproportional.

On the positive side, some companies have been able to pivot their business and are doing better than ever. He said he spoke to one customer who reported “they saw more demand in one month than they had ever seen in their best quarter that they have ever had in company history.” The companies faring best are the ones that offer necessities such as soap, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and paper towels.

“Then on the flip-side to that, we're seeing some other companies just absolutely plummet,” said Chan. As one might imagine, those that manufacture or sell consumer discretionary products have been hit hardest.

COVID-19 Is Influencing Technology

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technological tools. When Chan began researching the use of remote collaboration tools — such as Zoom, RingCentral, Slack, and UpKeep — he found, not surprisingly, that they had highest adoption rates at software companies. In contrast, the adoption rate has been “extremely low” in such sectors as manufacturing, wastewater treatment, and oil and gas.

“If we want to work from home, if we want to push toward doing the same amount of work but not having to be on the production floor, there is no way that we could do that from filing cabinets [with] papers stacked 10 feet high,” Chan said. “We have to move to a digital system. That's going to be paramount.”

One of the key areas of technology critical to industry during this era of sheltering in place and social distancing is the advancement in remote capabilities for factory work.

“We're going to still have to do the same amount of work in a plant, but we're going to have to do it with [fewer] people on the production floor. So how do we do that?” considered Chan. “It's going to come from more robotics, more automation, better remote condition monitoring that allows us to do the same level of work, whether we are standing right next to that piece of equipment or whether we're hundreds of thousands of miles away.”

He’s placing his bets on automation as the trend to watch right now. He thinks lights-out manufacturing, sometimes called a dark factory, will continue to rise, as these fully automated factories are capable of production even when no one can be on the factory floor.

He’s quick to clarify that this technology is to help workers, not replace them.

“I really want to emphasize your job is still very important," he clarified. "It just means that we can do it without having to stand right in front of that piece of equipment. It means that technology has enabled us to do our jobs potentially even more productively. It doesn't mean that it eliminates jobs.”

What’s Next for UpKeep?

“We have two main purposes for this new influx of capital,” said Chan. “One is to support continued innovation in the space.” Taking in the lessons from COVID-19, UpKeep is expanding into sensors. He's excited about this new venture, saying, “We just released our second product, actually, just about a month or two ago. It's essentially an IoT sensor platform that connects your remote condition monitoring to actual maintenance of your equipment.”

It won’t stop there.

He said, “We're going to continue to build new products, build new feature sets for our customers, and we're going to continue doubling down on the maintenance reliably industries across manufacturing, oil and gas, food and beverage manufacturing, food production.”

Community-focused Initiatives  

In addition to using the $36 million to fund new products, Chan said Upkeep will be “pouring all of our support out to the community.”

“I'm extremely passionate about the maintenance-reliability industry,” said Chan. “One of the reasons that gets me so excited about it is because of not just the impact but the breadth of how many people work in these jobs here in the U.S.”

The entrepreneur sees the hard work people behind the scenes do, often for very little acknowledgment.

“What we always say is that maintenance only gets called when something bad happens, but the moment that we step into a facility, we also have to realize that there are so many people working in the background that enable us to keep our facility running properly, keep our production lines running," he said. 

“You commonly don't think about the people that maintain support and sustain our world until something bad happens,” he noted. “We want to flip that around.”

Instead of remembering the challenge of bringing a production line back up after it goes down, he wants people to focus on the positive hard work someone does to keep things running day in and day out so that a business can succeed. 

Taking a three-pronged stance on how to support the community, Chan is present-focused and future-focused. “I think it starts with, one, shining a spotlight on the people that work in this industry; two, really focusing on education; and three, getting younger people interested in coming into this type of work [and] this field.” 

To this end, UpKeep has already started shining a spotlight on the “unsung heroes,” the 3.5 million people who come to the rescue at building facilities, plants, and production floors across the U.S.

There is a dedicated space on UpKeep's website called Heroes in Maintenance that shares inspiring stories of a traffic engineer who used failure as a stepping stone to success, a supervisor of maintenance who is ensuring access to clean drinking water isn’t interrupted during COVID-19, and a maintenance manager who landed in the industry by accident and is now working to close the skills gap.

Image Credit: Image courtesy of UpKeep