Chris
Turlica

One Statistic. A Company Worth Billions.

In 2018, while embedded as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, Chris Turlica came across a data point that didn't add up. Eighty percent of the global workforce - the people operating machinery, managing facilities, running warehouses, maintaining the physical infrastructure the modern economy depends on - never sit at a desk. Yet barely 1% of enterprise software budgets had ever been directed toward them.

It was the kind of number that only shocks you once, but once it does, you can't unsee it. Turlica called his former co-founder Hugo Dozois-Caouette. They'd already built and sold one company together. They built another prototype within weeks - a crude hybrid of Google Docs and Slack designed for the factory floor. It "rapidly took off."

That prototype became MaintainX, the AI-powered operations platform now serving more than 11,000 companies - from ABInBev to Duracell, Marriott to McDonald's - managing over 11 million assets and processing millions of work orders per year. The company closed a $150M Series D in July 2025, pushing its valuation to $2.5 billion and total funding to $254 million.

A Hedge Fund, a Hacker House, and a Messaging App

Turlica graduated from McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management in 2012 with a degree in Finance and Psychology for Management - an unusual pairing that turned out to be exactly right for building enterprise software that frontline workers actually use. His first job was at a Boston-based hedge fund run by a McGill alum. He stayed long enough to pass all three levels of the CFA exam, a credential that most people spend years failing to complete.

Then he moved to San Francisco.

In 2015, he and Hugo Dozois-Caouette were living in a hacker house and building Voo - a messaging startup that built scheduling and coordination apps on top of iMessage and Facebook Messenger. It was early thinking about software layered over communication that workers already use. After Voo was acquired by the small business platform Townsquared, Turlica became Director of Product there and noticed something unexpected: manufacturing plant workers were joining the platform and using it to photograph clipboards and share the images over chat. People were jury-rigging their own workflow tools out of whatever was available.

The pattern was unmistakable. And it repeated when he arrived at Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners to research mobile enterprise software trends.

Turlica credits McGill not just for the education but for the network. His first job came through a McGill alumnus. He met the VC connections that eventually connected him to MaintainX co-founders through the same alumni circle. He later served as President of the McGill Alumni Club of Northern California from 2016 to 2018 - running the chapter while simultaneously building his startup career across the Bay Area.

From Clipboard Photos to a $2.5B Platform

MaintainX launched in June 2018 with a straightforward premise: maintenance workers, facility managers, and industrial teams deserve software that works as well as what office workers take for granted. The founding team - Turlica (CEO), Hugo Dozois-Caouette (CTO), Nick Haase (go-to-market), and Mathieu Marengère-Gosselin (lead engineer) - built a mobile-first product designed to require no training manual.

Turlica's philosophy on product adoption is direct and somewhat defiant. The common complaint about frontline software adoption - that workers resist technology - struck him as a design problem, not a people problem.

The platform expanded accordion-style - simple enough to start, deep enough to scale. Work orders, preventative maintenance scheduling, inspection checklists, safety compliance, and eventually AI-powered asset management. MaintainX is now the operating layer for physical operations at thousands of companies across manufacturing, food and beverage, facilities management, healthcare, and hospitality.

From Seed to Unicorn to $2.5B

MaintainX's funding history traces a clear line from niche industrial software to full-stack AI infrastructure for physical operations. Each round expanded the scope of what the company was building.

The Series D, announced July 2025, drew in Bessemer Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, D.E. Shaw Ventures, Amity Ventures, August Capital, Founders Circle Capital, Sozo Ventures, and Fifth Down Capital. Angel investors include Rahul Mehta, co-founder of DST Global, and Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp. The round values MaintainX at $2.5 billion.

The capital is earmarked for expanding AI and machine health monitoring capabilities, advancing predictive maintenance, and building deeper enterprise asset management features - the kind of industrial intelligence that Turlica says should have existed a decade ago.

Turning Maintenance Workers into Knowledge Workers

The word Turlica uses most often when describing MaintainX's direction is not "maintenance" - it's "knowledge workers." The goal, as he frames it, is to take the people who keep physical infrastructure running and give them the same informational leverage that office workers get from Salesforce, Slack, and Google Workspace. The gap is absurd when you look at it: a plant manager responsible for millions of dollars in equipment often works from a printed binder and a clipboard.

MaintainX's AI layer is designed to address this directly. Predictive maintenance, real-time machine health monitoring, AI-assisted work order routing, and intelligent asset management are now core product pillars. The acquisition of Waites Sensor Technologies in late 2025 extended those capabilities into hardware-level machine data - closing the loop between sensor readings and automated maintenance response.

In May 2026, Forbes ran a feature titled "Why Factories Are The New Proving Ground For AI" - a frame that tracks almost exactly with Turlica's thesis from 2018. The physical world, with all its unpredictability, may be where AI finds its most consequential applications.

A Timeline

How Turlica Thinks

The Record So Far

• Built MaintainX from a 2018 prototype to a $2.5B valuation by 2025
• Named to the 2025 Forbes Cloud 100 for AI-powered industrial maintenance
• Raised $254M in total funding across Seed through Series D
• Grew MaintainX to serve 11,000+ companies managing 11M+ assets worldwide
• Ranked #48 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for North America (2024)
• Won G2 2025 Best Software Award
• Previously built and sold Voo to Townsquared
• Completed all three levels of the CFA exam
• Grew MaintainX's Montreal engineering office into the company's fastest-growing location
• Forbes Technology Council member; 500 Startups mentor

Details That Tell the Story