Technology Reseller v43

01732 759725 40 INTERVIEW Historically, we were heavily focused on lifts, but over time we have expanded into other regulated maintenance areas of the building. For instance, in France we are doing fire and safety, which we will soon be doing in the UK as well. We also maintain escalators and automated doors. The clue is in our name. We are called WeMaintain because we want to become the one-stop-shop for regulated maintenance inside the building. We created the company in 2017 and became commercially active in 2018. In 2019, we started conducting R&D into IoT with two objectives in mind – to improve operations, for example by detecting anomalies before the user notices them and identifying when a breakdown is going to occur before it happens; and to help our customers understand the usage of their buildings. A lift is effectively the spine of a building. Knowing how it is used and how often it is used tells you a lot about the actual usage of the building, about the occupancy rate, the traffic between floors. This can be helpful in optimising the flow of traffic inside a building, for example. And that is just for lifts. There are also great things to be done in other areas that we don’t cover yet, like HVAC systems. We see IoT as an enabler. It is not a product that works on its own. You still need skilled engineers to come on site and you still need people to interpret the data it produces, but it is an enabler for better service and a better understanding of a building. TR: Did you have IoT from the start? TF: No, we developed it over time and didn’t start rolling it out to all our customers until 2020. The idea from the get-go was to empower engineers through tech. IoT is a part of that, but it is not the whole thing. WeMaintain, one of President Macron’s favourite start-ups (see Tweet opposite), has raised e 30 million in Series B funding to drive international expansion and extend its smart buildings technology from lift and escalator maintenance into other areas. The company, founded in 2017 by Benoît Dupont, Jade Francine and Tristan Foureur, had previously raised € 1.8m and € 7m over two rounds in 2018 and 2019. With offices in Paris, London and Singapore, WeMaintain is aiming to transform lift and escalator maintenance, using IoT to provide building owners and managers with real-time data, smart maintenance and a next-generation customer experience. The combination of its proprietary cloud-based technology, IoT devices and skilled maintenance engineers has had a big impact in the regulated maintenance market, helping WeMaintain to win major contracts with Allianz Real Estate and WeWork, but the plan was always to bring the intelligence, visibility and control offered by its solutions to other critical building systems. To this end, WeMaintain recently acquired fire alarm solutions company Shokly. The new funding from Red River West, BPIFrance Digital Ventures and Swiss Immo Lab will give WeMaintain a big boost as it extends its technology into new applications and into additional overseas markets, including Asia and North America. The company opened a London office in 2020, winning contracts with coworking provider Workspace and KeolisAmey Docklands (KAD), operators of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), and earlier this year set up an office in Singapore to develop its operations in Asia-Pacific. With the onus on asset owners to make buildings smarter and greener, while also cutting costs and improving the service offered to tenants, the investment in WeMaintain could not be more timely. Technology Reseller finds out more from co-founder and CTO Tristan Foureur. Technology Reseller (TR ): So, tell me more about WeMaintain. You started out in lift maintenance, but are moving into other areas and using IoT to transform the service customers can expect. Tristan Foureur (TF): Yes, that’s right. The idea is to have a platform on which customers can manage and oversee their whole operations at a portfolio level and for engineers, through their app, to have a good overview of their portfolio and when deadlines are coming up. Anomalies or issues can be noticed by IoT-equipped devices, but they can also come from other sources – from insurance reports, from lift consultants, from users themselves via call centres. IoT is another source of qualified data that we get in real time and from the ground, but we have other means of capturing and generating data. TR: Is it too early to have measured the benefits of IoT? TF: No, we already have some really cool stories and use cases where IoT has generated value for customers. Even before the pandemic, estate owners wanted to understand the occupancy rate and use of their building, but during the pandemic especially they wanted to understand if they were at risk of losing tenants. Having real time traffic information helped them understand this – they were able to drill down and see if some tenants had stopped using their rented floors. We created a dedicated offer for the pandemic (in place until the end of 2021) that gives customers flexible pricing depending on the occupancy rate. We wanted to reflect the fact that if the equipment was being used less, it was going to be less time-consuming for our engineers to maintain. The equipment still has to be maintained every month, but we recognised that using IoT to measure likely wear and tear could have a positive impact on costs for the customer. Because our solution can be retrofitted to any type of equipment, you can see how having flexible pricing, be it for a single building or multiple buildings, makes Q&A with Tristan Foureur, CTO and co-founder of proptech company WeMaintain Tristan Foureur