He builds the boring, invisible layer that keeps your favorite restaurant's freezer from dying at 2am.
Somewhere right now a walk-in cooler is failing. A fryer is out. A rooftop HVAC unit is wheezing its last in the July heat. For a chain running hundreds of locations, that small mechanical death is a spreadsheet full of lost margin - food spoiled, doors closed, a technician who may or may not show up. Jared Schwartzentruber built a company around exactly that moment.
Prefix, the New York startup he founded in 2022 and runs as CEO, is a facility-management platform for multi-site restaurant and retail operators. In plainer terms: when something breaks at one of thousands of locations, Prefix is the calm coordination layer that gets it fixed - fast, tracked, and for less money. It plugs into the systems operators already use and leans on agentic AI to handle the frantic back-and-forth that used to eat a facilities manager's entire day.
The pitch is unsexy on purpose. Maintenance is where retail quietly bleeds - operators lose more than ten percent of their margins to errors and inefficiency. Schwartzentruber's wager is that fixing the plumbing beneath the plumbing is a very large business.
We set out to alleviate the most significant headaches in multisite facility management by improving the flow of data, communication and service. We are providing a critical layer that helps to optimize operations both in the stores and in the backoffice.
The résumé does not obviously lead to freezers. Schwartzentruber studied mechanical engineering at Purdue, where he worked on bio-inspired robotics - the field that borrows the mechanics of animals to build better machines. He went on to Columbia for a master's, adding mechatronics and a heavy dose of entrepreneurship to the toolkit.
His first company was Quio, a healthcare venture he co-founded and where he ran product for roughly six years. Healthcare and maintenance are not cousins on the surface, but they share a spine: in both, downtime carries a real cost, and the difference between a good day and a bad one is how fast the right information reaches the right person.
Between and around those chapters, he collected the venture-world credentials of a builder who likes to understand the money too - a Fellow at Kairos Society, a Venture Scout at Prototype Capital, an Analyst at Interplay Ventures. Then, in 2022, he pointed all of it at the industry nobody wanted: keeping restaurants and stores physically running.
The traditional approach to multi-site repair is fragmented and expensive - a patchwork of phone calls, faxes, favored vendors, and hope. A regional manager becomes an accidental dispatcher. Invoices arrive with no way to know if the price was fair. Equipment histories live in someone's memory. Prefix replaces that chaos with a service layer: responsive, 24/7 on-demand coverage for HVAC, refrigeration, plumbing, electrical, and the other trades where a slow fix means a dark storefront.
The engineering brain shows in how he frames it. A repair, to Schwartzentruber, is a problem of sensing and response - not so different from a robot deciding how to move. Detect the fault, route it, resolve it, learn from it. Do that ten thousand times and the data itself becomes the product.
In April 2026, Prefix closed a $7.5 million seed round co-led by Collide Capital and Slow Ventures, with Connexa Capital, Elevated (Kyle Archer), I2BF, and Bienville Capital along for the ride. By then the company had reached roughly $2.5 million in annual recurring revenue in two years, covering nearly 2,000 locations across 50 customers. Reported results: threefold efficiency improvements and more than 15% off maintenance spend. The names on the customer list are ones you have eaten at or shopped in.
The capital, he has said, goes toward the AI infrastructure, sales, and the scale needed to reach more than 10,000 locations across the U.S. It is an ambitious jump from where the company sits - and a very engineer-like way to think about growth: build the system once, then let it run everywhere.
Multi-location retailers lose more than a tenth of their margin to operational errors and inefficiency. Prefix's whole reason to exist is to shrink that leak. The bars below show the story Schwartzentruber tells operators: faster fixes, lower bills, more locations under one roof of coordination.
* Industry margin lost to maintenance errors and inefficiency, per Prefix. Bars are illustrative.
Studies mechanical engineering at Purdue, working on bio-inspired robotics.
Master's at Columbia - mechatronics, robotics, and a serious dose of entrepreneurship.
Co-founds Quio and leads product, spending six years in healthcare.
Founds Prefix in New York with one obsession: facility uptime.
Marks his first year at Prefix; the platform scales across thousands of sites.
Closes a $7.5M seed round and sets the target at 10,000 locations.
The goal is not a maintenance company. It is the coordination layer for every broken thing in every store - until downtime is just a solved problem.