Investing in WeMaintain, an elevator pitch.

Scaling to global leadership by lifting others

Joining the wonderful world of Growth Venture comes hand in hand with a privileged sneak peek on tomorrow’s disruptive technologies. In 2021, tech investors are excited by the likes of crypto, future of work or the quest for Eternal Life… Sometimes an opportunity comes along that doesn’t really fit these futurist categories at first sight but still represents an absolutely fascinating business.

At Red River West, we chose to deep dive on the world’s most used means of transportation, with 14 million vehicles in circulation travelling 3 billion rides per day (in 2019). We looked at this market and realised a French Player was shaking things up…

I’m talking about elevators, part of our everyday environment, we remember waiting patiently for them, the logos of the big 4 incumbents (Kone, ThyssenKrupp, Schindler and Otis) are printed in our memories. Otis has been around for 150 years and makes 60–80% of its profits from maintenance and overall the big 4 represented 64.4% Market Share in 2018.

Fixing building operations with tech

These players are good at installing elevators but they definitely haven’t embraced the digital revolution when it comes to optimizing their maintenance. In Paris, for example, 25% of the elevators are over 40 years old.

To put it simply, property asset owners want a solution to monitor building operations to match tenant’s quality expectations. They have been craving for tools and processes for doing so but up until now, they have had limited market power vs. vertically-defined building operations oligopolies.

WeMaintain has reshuffled the cards of this ecosystem:

• Maintenance interventions used to be routine pen & paper and technicians didn’t have full responsibility of their fleet because they changed sectors. WeMaintain has fixed this by setting up buildings with game-changing in-house software connecting all the stakeholders and increasing visibility. WeMaintain’s tool makes the technician independent, responsible and self-sufficient.
• The data collected used to be low quality and in silos, WeMaintain has changed this thanks to cutting edge IoT (>11M data points gathered up to date) to reduce intervention frequency and length.
• Technicians working with WeMaintain are more efficient: average elevator unit per technician has gone down from 150 to 80 and overall, the maintenance quality is higher: WeMaintain guarantees a breakdown rate of less than 3 per unit.

Overall, WeMaintain gives asset owners and operators an end-to-end solution for carrying out critical maintenance operations and provides high-quality data through proprietary technological solutions that improves knowledge of assets.

Elevator technicians are a high skilled blue collar category (best paid blue collar job in the US) that can’t be fully automated in the near future. Technology empowers their lift engineers and customers.

A 100B$ opportunity

All this is happening on a market that has the rare combination of being huge (40B$ for elevator maintenance, Otis actually generated 13B$ sales in 2019 of which 60% was for maintenance and service) and regulated (legislation requires a mandatory check-up of each elevator at six-week intervals in France).

This market is ripe for disruption, the building operations oligopoly position was to be exposed in 2007 to the EU’s largest regulator imposed, price-fixing fine ever (992M€).

With early 2021 acquisition of Shokly, a fire alarm maintenance and management platform, the startup is clearly expanding its ambition beyond lift maintenance. Indeed, elevators are only the beginning, WeMaintain targets the whole building operations value chain including heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), Fire and Automatic Doors. Giving building asset owners and technicians the world’s first tech enabled end-to-end building operations platform is a 100B$ opportunity.

WeMaintain has the potential to become one of Europe’s first Proptech unicorn (76% of Proptech unicorns are American and 24% are Chinese). This is at the heart of our thesis: scaling outstanding French & European Tech companies into Global leaders.

At RRW we believe becoming a global tech leader requires an expansion in the US. Our aim is to provide game changing support to French/European start-ups to make this expansion successful.

In the US, 19,000 firms are currently engaged in the elevator installation and service category. These firms are responsible for the direct employment of about 107,000 people each year.

The US is also home to 7 of the 10 largest asset owners and represents 25% of the global elevator industry. These reasons amongst many others convinced us WeMaintain needs to seize the US opportunity fast by expanding city by city. (IBIS World)

An exceptional mission driven team

This unique model was built by a complementary founding team made of 3 friends:

Benoit (CEO) is an insider, having the rare and relevant experience of 12 years at the heart of Otis in China, his will to transform the industry is truly inspirational.

Jade (COO) has managed operations brilliantly since inception leveraging her professional and personal international background.

Tristan (CTO) met Benoit and Jade in Bangalore and was seduced simultaneously by the technical challenge and social impact of the project, he has impressed us with his great product roadmap execution and vision.

The team has established strong values that they take very seriously. Their motto is “We rise by lifting others” and their three values are Care, Grit, Uniqueness, the guiding lines of all their work and actions at WeMaintain (the company is actually an “Entreprise à Mission”).

All these values are perfectly aligned with RRW’s beliefs and we love the work the company is doing on energy efficiency of smart buildings and technician empowerment while also enabling safer work and living spaces.

In addition to an exceptional team, there are quite a few elements that backed our decision to invest in WeMaintain, we believe that the impressive commercial performance over the past 3 years is only the beginning and that the current pipeline, upsell potential and overall predictability of the revenue model will lead to skyrocketing growth in the next few years.

We led a 30M€ Series B along other complementary investors we are glad to have onboard such as BPI, Swiss Immo Labs, Eurazeo, RAISE and Verve Ventures.

We are convinced that while elevators are meant to stop at the last floor, WeMaintain is going straight to the moon.

Bertrand Schmitt & Joseph Houssais