The Man With a Checklist Problem
Walk into the average American factory in 2018 and you'd find something remarkable: billion-dollar machines being tracked on clipboards. Work orders scrawled on whiteboards. Maintenance histories lost in filing cabinets. The software industry had spent decades building tools for knowledge workers with laptops and corner offices - and almost nothing for the people keeping industrial America running.
Nick Haase noticed. And then he spent the next seven years doing something about it.
Haase co-founded MaintainX in San Francisco in June 2018 alongside Chris Turlica (CEO), Hugo Dozois-Caouette (CTO), and Mathieu Marengere-Gosselin. The pitch was simple: give frontline maintenance workers a mobile-first platform they'd actually want to use. No legacy enterprise UX. No desktop-only access. No consulting engagement required to configure it.
What makes Haase's contribution distinctive is how he approached go-to-market. He didn't demo from conference rooms. By his own account, he's spent thousands of hours on actual shop floors - walking production lines, talking to maintenance managers, understanding what a $2 million pump failure looks like at 2am on a Sunday. That ground-level immersion became MaintainX's competitive edge.
Getting people to stop using paper checklists one day at a time.
- Nick Haase, Twitter/X bio (@theNickHaase)The company's growth chart reads like a case study in product-market fit found early and scaled hard. MaintainX now manages more than 15 million work orders across 11,000+ enterprise customers - spanning manufacturing, food and beverage, distribution centers, and facilities management. Its platform handles 2.5 million assets globally. In December 2023, it crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold and joined the unicorn club.
The July 2025 Series D - $150 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from D.E. Shaw Ventures, Amity Ventures, and August Capital - pushed the valuation to $2.5 billion. By that point, MaintainX was running at $115.5 million in annual recurring revenue. The company's investors include notable angels like Rahul Mehta, co-founder of DST Global, and Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp.
The Series D funds are going toward AI-powered predictive maintenance and machine health monitoring - territory where MaintainX is moving fast. The company's May 2026 State of Industrial Maintenance Report found that 58% of maintenance teams now use AI tools, with 75% reporting measurable ROI within six months. MaintainX launched its Report Builder AI in March 2026, letting operations teams query their asset and work data in plain language.
The Deskless Worker Problem
Roughly 80% of the global workforce doesn't work at a desk. For decades, enterprise software ignored them entirely. MaintainX was built for the maintenance manager coordinating a 3am repair, the reliability engineer tracking asset failure patterns, the frontline technician needing a procedure without calling the supervisor. Haase's go-to-market is built on that insight - and his willingness to learn it firsthand, plant by plant.
Before MaintainX, Haase's entrepreneurial instincts ran toward consumer technology. He founded The Daily Hundred in 2012 - a mobile marketing platform that rewarded users for creating and sharing branded content, a model that predated the creator economy terminology but understood its logic. The company later rebranded as Loot! before Haase moved on. It was an education in consumer behavior, virality, and the hard physics of getting people to change habits.
That background shapes how MaintainX approaches adoption. The challenge of getting a factory worker to abandon a paper binder isn't different in kind from getting someone to change any entrenched daily behavior - it requires the software to be genuinely better in ways the user feels immediately, not after training. Haase brought that consumer-psychology lens to an industry that hadn't thought in those terms.
Alongside MaintainX, Haase has quietly assembled a portfolio of more than 40 angel investments. His picks signal a specific worldview: Anduril (defense technology), Hadrian (precision manufacturing), Figure (humanoid robotics), Density (occupancy analytics), Ditto (enterprise software), Loyal (pet longevity), Living Carbon (biotech forestry). The common thread isn't sector - it's the conviction that hardware and physical-world technology are underrated by a software-centric venture ecosystem. He's also active in Hardware Massive, the global hardware startup community.
Haase studied Finance, Political Science, and Economics at Emory University, completing his degree in 3.5 years. He's been based in San Francisco throughout his career. As an active voice at events like Smart Manufacturing Week and the Manufacturing Leadership Council's Rethink conference, he operates as a bridge between Silicon Valley product culture and the operational realities of industrial America - a translator working in both directions.
MaintainX's G2 ranking as the #1 overall leader in CMMS and Asset Management in both 2024 and 2026 - and the 2026 G2 Best Software Award outright - suggests the product has crossed from good-enough into genuinely best-in-class territory. The platform is now integrated with Inductive Automation's Ignition SCADA system, connecting sensor data directly to automated maintenance workflows. The industrial IoT convergence that everyone predicted for years is happening, and MaintainX is positioned squarely in its path.