Entrepreneurship Zone: 20 May 2020: Meet The Chemical Engineer Who Accidentally Turned Into An Entrepreneur And Just Raised $36 Million For His App

Wed May 20 03:12:23 CAT 2020

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In 2014, freshly graduated UC Berkeley alum Ryan Chan was working as a chemical engineer at a water purification plant, when he realized that the company was constantly facing equipment downtime. The workers used a maintenance program that helped them track all the breakdowns, but there was a big problem with the software they were using that was slowing them down.

“Everything was desktop based, but the maintenance team, the people that were using it, never sat at a desk,” Chan says. 

So Chan realized there had to be a smarter, mobile-first solution for all the blue collar workers across facilities. He wound up teaching himself how to code at night and on weekends, and developed the app while he worked as a chemical engineer, and later as an iOS developer.

In 2016, Chan launched UpKeep, an app developed for facility managers and maintenance workers that allows them to flag things that need repairs and run equipment audits across facilities.

In mid-May, the company founded by the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree announced it raised $36 million in a Series B round, led by Insight Partners with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, Battery Ventures, Y Combinator, Mucker Capital, and Fundersclub.

Ryan Chan, Founder and CEO of UpKeep 

“Because of what’s going on there’s a huge spot on sanitation, on facility managers and on sanitation workers,” Chan, who serves as the company’s CEO, says. “Those are the folks that are going to enable us to feel safe when going back to work.”

The UpKeep app serves as the communication tool that allows users to both flag a piece that needs repair (elevators, fire distinguishers, manufacturing machinery), as well as organize and run preventative maintenance and safety audits. 

One simple example of how UpKeep is used is a worker noticing that an air conditioning unit is broken. The worker would snap a picture from their phone, create a work request on UpKeep, and assign that to the facility manager. The facility manager would get a notification on UpKeep and is able to send out a technician to go out and fix that unit.

“Now it’s packaged all as one, it doesn’t matter if the facility manager is 100 miles away,” Chan says. “They get a notification on their device, they send out a technician, that technician now has the picture, the exact location, the entire audit trail and history of who’s done what on that unit.”

Screenshot from UpKeep's website

 UPKEEP

Since its creation, UpKeep has processed more than 10 million work orders and its revenue grew 206% last year. The platform counts 100 employees and over 2,000 paying businesses as clients (around 80% of which are U.S. based). Among them are Unilever, Siemens, Marriott, and McDonald’s.

According to Chan, many people do not immediately realize how big facility management is because it is often done in the background. 

“We don’t think about the repair worker or the janitor until we notice that a piece of equipment is broken or that the floor is not clean,” Chan says. “But maintenance is in every single industry, in every single building that you set your foot into, in every country in the world.”

After participating in the Y Combinator Winter program in 2017, the Los Angeles- based UpKeep raised almost $3 million in a seed round, and $10 million in Series A in 2018. The new round of $36 million brings the total amount invested in the company to almost $50 million.

However, Chan, who got a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering, says that he never thought about entrepreneurship as a career for him.

“The reason why I went into engineering was because I liked building and getting my hands dirty,” Chan says. “When I got into the actual chemical engineering industry, I realized the industry was really slow to move and when it couldn't move at the rate I wanted it to, I turned to technology to help me.”

UpKeep's headquarters in Los Angeles

 UPKEEP

-Forbes

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