A new chapter of growth for UpKeep

Today I'm excited to announce that UpKeep has received a strategic growth investment from Accel-KKR. It also marks 10 years since I started UpKeep.

When I started UpKeep in 2016, I was a process engineer teaching myself to code at night, pitching mobile-first software to maintenance technicians at a time when the category didn't really exist yet. Most of the investors I met passed, and most of the customers I cold-emailed never replied. 

A small group of people said yes anyway. Tom from Stericycle was my first customer, putting budget behind a one-person company working out of my mom's garage. Tom believed his maintenance team deserved better tools. Advait wrote our first check before the pitch made sense and before there was much of a company to back. The Y Combinator partners in 2016 took a chance on me while I was still figuring out how to charge for the product. The first ten employees joined without any guarantees. The early checks from Emergence, Insight, Battery, Mucker, and Fundersclub came in when we were still a handful of people in a small office.

None of what UpKeep is today, with more than 400,000 users across 60 countries and customers like Unilever, Siemens, DHL, and McDonald's, exists without those early yeses.

Why Accel-KKR

We had the opportunity to choose who to partner with for this next chapter. I wanted to work with a team that had the expertise to help us scale and that genuinely believed in our mission and vision to build the category-defining company in asset operations. Accel-KKR is that partner. They've been investing in software companies for more than 25 years, they understood what we were building, and they shared our conviction that this is a generational opportunity.

 Over the last ten years, the opportunity in front of us has grown bigger than what I initially envisioned and this partnership gives us the resources and capital to deliver that vision.

What this means for our customers

The day-to-day stays the same, but the pace accelerates. We'll be able to invest more in the things you've been asking for and ship faster on the roadmap you already know.

The next 10 years ahead

The first decade was about putting modern, mobile software into the hands of the deskless workforce, the people who actually keep the physical world running. The next decade is about putting AI agents next to them, and giving every operations team a partner that handles the routine work so technicians can focus on what actually requires human judgment in the physical world.

That's the bet behind Supernova. We're building AI agents that watch the work, understand the systems, and take action with the team's approval for the deskless workforce. The line between maintenance, safety, and learning will dissolve over the next several years. The technician who fixes the equipment is the same person who follows the safety protocol and the same person who needs to be trained on the new procedure. We're building a single platform for how operations teams really work, with AI woven through every layer.

Thank you

To our customers, thank you for trusting us to support your maintenance and operations teams. And it's only going to get better from here.

And to the UpKeep team, current and former, you built UpKeep into what it is today. There's no version of today that exists without the work each of you put in over the last 10 years.

Looking forward to the next decade ahead with UpKeep. I couldn't be more excited about what's to come.

Ryan