Company: WeMaintain
Website: https://www.wemaintain.co.uk/
About Jade & WeMaintain
After studying in China and working at a Shanghai law firm, where she helped entrepreneurs to set up businesses, Jade co-founded WeMaintain in 2017 with the mission to put the best of people and technology at the heart of the built environment. To do this, they developed their own state-of-the-art technology to empower customers and engineers. In less than four years, WeMaintain has developed a one-of-a-kind, end-to-end, tech-enabled solution.
Starting with one of the most critical and dysfunctional systems in modern buildings—lifts and escalators—and using ‘technology-agnostic’ proprietary IoT, WeMaintain sweeps up rich data from the field, painting a clear picture of use and performance for asset owners and managers. Thanks to this technology and work done by engineers, over a six-month maintenance period, WeMaintain cuts the number of breakdowns by three.
What sets them apart is the customer-centric (rather than machine-centric) approach. They put the human experience first, supported by state-of-the-art technology. The co-founders, Benoit Dupont and Tristan Foureur, all have different backgrounds and expertise but all agree that the combination of these two factors is what drives our success.
The engineering profession has been wildly undervalued within the industry. It is overly reliant on manual reporting techniques, which means engineers arrive to do their job with partial information, limited room for feedback and little communication with their employer. They have been able to attract top talent to work for them because their project invests in time and dialogue with everyone they work with, at every level.
In the beginning, business angels wanted to offer them funding in exchange for control of the company. She is glad we turned them down and found investors who understood the long-term vision. Today they’re able to challenge their few competitors on technology, quality and price. Jade thinks they are where they are because the three founders genuinely believe that the solution offers genuine value to customers and a much better standard of working for engineers.
So far WeMaintain has doubled the size of teams between early 2021 and early 2022. Towards the end of 2022, the company plans to recruit another 50 people. In addition to this, the company has recently raised €30m to open a new office in Singapore and extend its solution to the full building.
The business is a mix of technology, engineering on the ground, and real estate, not the most progressive industries in terms of diversity. Yet they have more than 30% of women on the team.
They’ve many females at very different positions and are proud to have a tradition of female leadership at WeMaintain. They know it makes a difference in the long-term. Diversity truly brings great financial results and creates a better environment for everyone. They are aware of this and at the same time they have to deal with their very fast growth and need to hire quickly.
