Ryan Chan

Founder & CEO UpKeep

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Ryan Chan is a chemical engineer who noticed a software problem on a factory floor. Working as a process development engineer at TriSep, a membrane manufacturer, he watched maintenance teams run on paper work orders — clipboards carried between assets, transcribed later into a desktop system nobody on the floor could reach. Every technician had a smartphone. He taught himself iOS development, spent a stint as an app developer at Xperi, and built UpKeep as a mobile-first computerised maintenance management system where the work order lives on the phone in the technician’s hand. The company has since grown well past that single product into what Chan named asset operations management: maintenance, safety, workforce training, IIoT edge sensors, fleet and an AI layer, with over 40,000 users and more than 4,000 companies. He raised roughly $48.8 million from Emergence Capital, Battery Ventures, Y Combinator and Mucker Capital, was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Manufacturing and Industry in 2018, and wrote the book that defines the category.

Career Highlights

• Founded UpKeep and has been its chief executive throughout, growing it to over 40,000 users and more than 4,000 companies from a Los Angeles base.
• Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for Manufacturing and Industry in 2018, at 26.
• Raised roughly $48.8 million across four rounds, including a $2.7 million early round and a $10 million Series A led by Emergence Capital with Battery Ventures, Y Combinator and Mucker Capital participating.
• Wrote Asset Operations, the book setting out the eight pillars of asset operations management, and presented the framework at the Reliable Plant Conference.
• Co-authored the ebook How Maintenance Will Revolutionize The World with UpKeep’s chief of staff, Caitlyn Young, and hosts the Maintenance Mavericks podcast.
• Expanded the product line from CMMS alone to safety, UpKeep Learn, Nova AI, Edge IIoT sensors, fleet maintenance and service-provider tools.
• Built out an executive team including a CFO, CTO and senior vice presidents for customer success, people, sales and marketing.

Professional Journey

Chan took a chemical engineering degree at the University of California, Berkeley and started work in 2013 as a process development engineer at TriSep Corporation, a membrane manufacturer. The job put him next to the maintenance function, and the gap he saw there was not one of expertise but of tooling: skilled technicians losing hours to paper work orders and to maintenance software that had never been designed to be used away from a desk.

He moved to Xperi Corporation as an iOS developer, which gave him the mobile engineering skills the idea needed, and built the first version of UpKeep in his spare time. The design premise was inverted from the incumbents: rather than a desktop CMMS with a companion app, UpKeep was built phone-first, on the assumption that the primary user is standing in front of a machine.

Early funding came through Y Combinator, followed by Mucker Capital and Battery Ventures, and then a $10 million Series A led by Emergence Capital. Total funding reached roughly $48.8 million. Recognition followed quickly — Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list for Manufacturing and Industry in 2018, and he used the platform to argue a consistent theme: that an economy fixated on innovators undervalues the maintainers who keep physical infrastructure running.

The strategic move that defines the company’s second phase was category creation. Rather than compete as another CMMS vendor, Chan reframed the market as asset operations management — connecting maintenance to reliability, safety, training and sensor data rather than treating work orders as an isolated workflow. He set the framework out in a book, Asset Operations: The Future of Maintenance, Reliability, and Operations, organised around eight pillars, and took it to industry conferences including Reliable Plant. The product line expanded to match, adding a safety product, a learning platform, Edge IIoT sensors feeding condition data back into the system, fleet maintenance, tools for service providers, and Nova AI.

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Bachelor of Science, Chemical Engineering