MTR Lab Announces Investment in WeMaintain
MTR Lab Company Limited (“MTR Lab”) has joined as a new investor in WeMaintain alongside existing investors including Eurazeo, Red River West and Bpifrance, the French Sovereign Wealth Fund. The investment will support WeMaintain’s expansion across Asia-Pacific, including entering the Hong Kong market, as the scaleup company looks to digitally transform the building operations industry, starting with lift and escalator maintenance. This marks MTR Lab’s first foray into investing in an overseas startup and supporting a B Corporation – a company verified to meet high standards of accountability, transparency, and social and environmental performance.
Founded in France in 2017, WeMaintain has disrupted the traditional model of building maintenance with end-to-end solutions, Internet of Things (IoT) integration, and predictive maintenance capabilities. Through its digital platform and on-site engineering expertise, WeMaintain allows for remote, live monitoring of building operations, including lifts and escalators, and leverages data analytics to enable predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Today, the company stands as an international PropTech pioneer, actively redefining building operations and facilities maintenance with its transformative technologies.
Powering a smarter and greener future together
WeMaintain’s data-driven solutions not only reduce equipment downtime and safety incidents, they also enhance the efficiency of lift and escalator maintenance by saving time and energy consumed for a smarter, safer, and more sustainable urban environment. The equipment data collected by WeMaintain’s devices, coupled with input from field engineers, provides valuable insights into component utilisation which, in turn, enables the identification of repair and replacement needs.
This facilitates the implementation of prescriptive maintenance solutions that proactively flag necessary repairs, optimise maintenance schedules and priorities, and facilitate capital expenditure planning. With the investment from MTR Lab and other investors, WeMaintain will strengthen its research and development efforts, enhance product development in both software and hardware and expand in Asia-Pacific.
As an innovation investor, MTR Lab is committed to introducing technologies across sectors to drive improvements and co-create a smarter, greener future. This investment in WeMaintain aligns with MTR Lab’s focus on smart city technology and sustainability, as well as the Hong Kong SAR Government’s policy direction of encouraging the introduction of smart technologies in housing estate management, by advancing the digitalisation of lift maintenance and building operations. Beyond financial investment, MTR Lab hopes to support WeMaintain as a strategic investor to help the scaleup company grow in Asia-Pacific including Hong Kong.
“WeMaintain’s vision to advance how people and technology come together to manage buildings, and its efforts in fostering more efficient, predictive and sustainable infrastructure solutions, strongly align with MTR Lab’s goal of promoting smart city development,” said Mr Michael Chan, Managing Director of MTR Lab. “By supporting the company’s expansion and enabling it to extend its industry-leading maintenance solutions across borders, we hope to contribute to the development and adoption of smart city solutions in Asia-Pacific and help improve the region’s building operations sector in an efficient and sustainable way.”
Mr Benoit Dupont, Co-founder & CEO of WeMaintain, said, “Asia is central to our global strategy, and we’re thrilled to leverage the expertise and support of MTR Lab as we expand operations across the region. What distinguishes WeMaintain is our unique combination of on-the-ground expertise, an in-house team of skilled data scientists, and IoT engineers dedicated to ensuring the highest data quality. Substantial investments have been made in data science and IoT, with rigorous training of our algorithmic models to proficiently recognise and identify pertinent information. Armed with these capabilities, our goal is to revolutionise the building operations sector, not only in Europe but worldwide.”
Elevating the future of building operations
WeMaintain’s mission is to put the best of people and technology at the heart of the built environment. With an existing presence in France, the United Kingdom, and Singapore, and over 2,500 buildings in its maintenance portfolio, the company’s IoT-based solutions have demonstrated exceptional results, including an average of 30% energy savings per year on frequently used elevators and a 20% reduction in breakdowns on high-density sites.
With clients like SNCF (France’s national state-owned railway company) and Keolis, the company has proven its solution delivers higher efficiencies and a superior customer experience. The successful investment from MTR Lab will accelerate WeMaintain’s future advancements and growth in high-potential Asia-Pacific markets such as Hong Kong and Singapore, where it established an operational base in 2021, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. This expansion aligns with MTR Lab’s mission to support innovative startups driving positive impact in the regions they serve.
