Today we are proud to announce that MaintainX has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Autodesk for approximately $3.6 billion. This is an exceptional outcome for a company and team.

When we led the Series C in 2023, the core insight was simple: the physical world runs on maintenance, and maintenance runs on clipboards. Every factory, distribution center, and hospital in the world depends on technicians who were still managing operations with paper and pen, or on legacy software built before the iPhone. MaintainX was an early company to take that problem seriously as a software opportunity. They put a consumer-grade mobile app in the hands of the frontline, initiating powerful data capture that allowed MaintainX to operate as a true system of record for physical operations.

We don’t think of “industrials” and “PLG” as operating in the same universe, but MaintainX defied this belief from the start. Factories began to adopt MaintainX because frontline workers liked the app. Regional managers began to notice that certain factories were outperforming on efficiency and downtime. When they investigated, they found that MaintainX was the driving force. COOs began to notice that regions outperformed, and would similarly find regional champions for MaintainX as the basis. MaintainX became the rare industrial software company that could be adopted in a lightweight way and go on to fundamentally transform massive, complex businesses.

MaintainX’s core business was already excellent. In recent years, the AI layer drove compounding growth. Digitizing work orders creates the dataset for operations. The dataset trains the models. The models make every technician more effective from day one, which drives adoption, which creates more data. MaintainX figured out that flywheel early and executed against it with unusual discipline.

Chris Turlica is at the heart of the story. He left Romania at age 15 for high school in Connecticut, speaking English he’d taught himself from watching Cartoon Network. After McGill and a CFA, he walked away from a finance role in Boston and moved to SF to build. His first startup, a consumer chat app, gave him the founding insight for MaintainX: factory workers were signing up for the app to photograph clipboards and discuss work orders. After recognizing this opportunity, Chris ran through walls to build a business around it.

Chris is one of the most relentless and committed operators that we’ve encountered. He treats frontline teams as experts, not as an abstract “underserved market,” and that respect shows up in the strength of MaintainX’s product, customer relationships and culture. He is a rare founder that drives his team to excellence and intensity but remains approachable enough that they make memes of him live during all-hands calls. He personifies the “highly competent, humble optimist” archetype that he seeks to hire. He and Hugo Dozois-Caouette have built a high-caliber team around them that executes, winning customer loyalty.

MaintainX’s results show up in the customer data. Titan America eliminated 30% of unplanned downtime in under a year — tracking over 2,700 meters across 800 assets — after years of managing inspections by hand. Duracell integrated MaintainX with SAP and now saves an estimated $50,000 per site annually on parts inventory alone, with their transformation manager describing it as "one of the smoothest integrations I've ever seen in my career." Cintas, whose VP of Quality and Engineering described MaintainX as "an investment in our company's future," is building a data foundation across its facilities that will compound in value for years. Since our original investment in 2023, we’ve seen these types of outcomes proliferate at some of the most operationally demanding companies in the world.

Why Autodesk and MaintainX

Industrial software has long had a sequencing problem. Design tools capture how an asset is supposed to work. Operations platforms capture how it actually works. Those two data sets have almost never talked to each other, which means engineers design without feedback from the field, and operators maintain without context from the original design. That gap costs the industry billions annually in avoidable failures and inefficient capital allocation.

Autodesk’s proposed acquisition of MaintainX closes that loop for the first time at scale. When a piece of equipment fails repeatedly under certain conditions, that pattern can flow back into design to inform the next generation of equipment. When a facility is being designed, the maintenance history of comparable facilities can inform decisions. This isn’t just a distribution story, it is a data story, and over time we think that the design and operations dataset will be among the most valuable in industrial tech. We believe this combination has the potential to define how the physical world is designed, built and maintained for decades.

We’re proud to have been part of MaintainX’s story to date, from leading the Series C to doubling down on the Series D. Congratulations to Chris, Hugo and the MaintainX team on all that you’ve accomplished - we’re thrilled to watch as MaintainX and Autodesk continue to move the industrial world into the age of AI.