In January 2020, as Krish Inbarajan and his colleagues planned out the next year for Preteckt, their predictive maintenance startup, they received an alert about one of their client's trucks.
Its engine was going to break down.
The truck was in Canada, where the frigid air could spell trouble for both the goods and the driver. Quickly, Preteckt called the client’s VP of maintenance and told them the engine would fail. Preteckt wanted to give a head's up so the the engine could be fixed before it became a major problem.
For Inbarajan, who had been with Preteckt just a few months, the event validated his decision to join the company, and confirmed its potential.
“Yes, we had not predicted it two days or two weeks before, we were predicting it like it was going to happen now. But even that was better than having a breakdown,” he said. “That was a huge ‘a-ha’ moment, where I was able to clearly see how we’re able to make something impactful happen.”
Flash-forward to now, and the startup, founded in the Bluff City in 2015, has continued to have an impact. It provides a predictive maintenance software for trucking companies and public transit systems. To date, it’s raised $5 million in seed funding; and recently, it scored a $1.7 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the U.S. Army, which was matched with a $300,000 check from the entrepreneurship support organization LaunchTN.
And though Preteckt currently has 25 employees spread across 15 states, Memphis is still considered its headquarters. The bulk of the company’s software engineering team live in the city, along with its head of hardware engineering and a legal technician.
Memphis has also played a key role in the startup’s development. In its early days, Preteckt received ample support from organizations such as Start Co., and the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) gave it the chance to work with public transportation systems and not just truck fleets. According to Inbarajan, MATA CEO Gary Rosenfeld approached the startup, and asked them to help prevent breakdowns on buses.
The organization remains a client today.
“Memphis is special to us,” Inbarajan said. “We owe a lot to it.”
The company is reliant on vehicle data; to collect this information, it either works with devices already within a client’s vehicles or works with partner firms to install the proper devices. Then, Preteckt’s software uses the sensor data taken from these vehicles to predict problems and breakdowns, as engine failures often don’t occur instantaneously but over time, as smaller parts start to malfunction.
Let’s say a particular part within an engine begins to have problems. Preteckt’s software can see this, and the vehicle can be taken to a facility for maintenance, with the part already identified.
Otherwise, that failing part could ultimately lead to a much larger engine failure — and rather than replacing one $500 item, you could be stuck with a cost that could be more like $10,000.
“The downstream impact, you’re able to prevent,” Inbarajan said. “Because once it impacts the entire engine, there’s a breakdown, and people and all the goods are stranded on the roadside.”
Currently, the company has more than 10 clients, which range significantly in fleet size; and in five years, Inbarajan said he wants the company to be able to support upwards of 100,000 to 200,000 vehicles.
“We really would like to be helping maintainers and maintenance facilities, across multiple industries, do their job more efficiently,” he said. “We’d like to be a tool maintainers say that, without which, they can’t do their job."
