NewTech Friday: WeMaintain – an end-to-end digital maintenance solution for the real estate industry

Benoit Dupont, co-Founder & CEO of WeMaintain, describes how the PropTech aims to transform an industry with low digital penetration.

What led to the creation of WeMaintain?

First, it was the acknowledgement that the world has changed and that we are in the middle of a radical transformation of every single sector with the appearance of digital technologies. This transformation opens doors to new players to invent new asset-light models and compete with very large established industrial businesses around the world.

Real estate is the largest asset class in the world and represents close to $300T, yet it still has an extremely low digitization rate. Inside of this massive asset class, there are a lot of frictions that can be solved using technology and among them, building operations. I used to work for the leading player in the elevator industry for a little more than 10 years, 8 of which were in China and the north Asia Pacific area. There I witnessed the massive success of this organization in the past Industrial Age, yet could also see the limits of not being able to transform itself into a digital company. I met with Jade Francine (COO) and Tristan Foureur (CTO), my two co-founders, and we decided to build a new model from scratch that could address asset owners' and property managers' needs to radically streamline their building operations.