We’re here, half a decade later, celebrating WeMaintain’s 5th anniversary. It was this time 5 years ago that Jade, Benoit & Tristan set out to change the building maintenance industry and show everyone there was an alternative way to operate.

It’s been a great journey, bringing together people from all walks of life and backgrounds to create something that we’re truly proud of, especially knowing this is only the beginning.

How it started‍

To recap on how we got here, it all started with Benoit, having worked for one of the major elevator companies in the industry, he had seen first-hand how there were gaps in the market for innovation. He was in China at the time he met and teamed up with Jade, before meeting Tristan in India. A few things were agreed upon between the 3; the engineering profession was completely undervalued; there was a lack of innovation and technology; the level of communication was a hindrance to relationships.

“Our goal was that customers, in particular owners and users of large building stocks, could obtain the reliability of their equipment, economic gains and data allowing them not only to control but to implement relevant ESG actions according to the use of buildings.” - Benoit, Dupont, CEO.

In an industry where the reactive takes precedence over the preventive, the needs of the users and owners aren’t listened to. We wanted to make technology that makes it possible to solve this kind of problem, to transform traditional models.

“There was a lack of communication and trust in the sector. Our aim was to change that by bringing transparency and a customer-first approach to the lift maintenance market.” - Jade Francine, COO.

We also wanted to improve communication and the experience for everyone involved, engineers, property managers, asset owners and facilities managers alike. As well as working towards ways we can reduce the impact of regulated building maintenance operations on the environment.

How it’s going

We’ve developed technology to empower our engineers and enlighten our customers. This enables our engineers to better understand issues and work more efficiently, halving their workload by 50% compared to industry standards. These benefits ricochet through to our customers, allowing their dedicated engineers to provide more careful and comprehensive maintenance and ultimately extend the life of their assets. Our technology has also created visibility in real-time for our customers - they are well and truly kept in the loop and as updated on maintenance as the rest of the WeMaintain team are on their assets.

“To do this, we have redesigned the working conditions of technicians to embark them on the adventure, designed agnostic sensors to collect data from equipment, as well as developed a suite of software ranging from the field app to the customer platform.” - Benoit Dupont, CEO.

We started with the most broken vertical, elevators, and expanded our solutions to include escalators, automatic doors, fire alarm systems and next up: HVAC. We’ve managed to provide better value to our customers than traditional OEMs, by having a customer-first approach, listening to their pain points and redefining the norm. This offer is available across the 3 countries and 4 cities we’ve launched in, with more cities joining us soon.

We’re happy to see how our expansion has demonstrated that we no longer fit within just the lift maintenance category, but now full building regulated building maintenance.

People

Our mission is to put the best of people and technology at the heart of the built environment, and this has been guiding our operations over the past 5 years.

It was essential for us to include ‘people’ in our mission as this focus has formed the basis of WeMaintain’s creation, and wouldn’t have been possible without them. Specifically, our team, both engineers and those in the office, our investors and partners who believed in our mission at the start and our first clients who took a chance on us.

Ultimately, it is the people who have made WeMaintain what it is. Each person who joins the team is recruited based on our three core values; care, grit and uniqueness. It is these values that each person shares and shape our day-to-day work.

As successful as WeMaintain gets, as innovative as our tech is, a company is just a lot of people in the end. Passionate, motivated and hard-working people, all dedicated to achieving the same goal and improving the building maintenance industry.

Looking to the future

Reflecting on the past 5 years, we have come a long way from the small apartment our team made up of only a few people were working out of in Paris, to now being considered a global company operating in 3 countries, but there is so much more to come.

The next 5 years will include working on our expansion plan, perfecting our technology and continuing to act on our ESG initiatives. We put these aims in mind not only to benefit WeMaintain but all stakeholders, our clients and their building users and the world around us.

Find out more

If you're interested in working with WeMaintain, contact our Head of Sales at cheryl@wemaintain.com.