ServiceMax Inc., whose cloud services are used by companies such as General Electric Co. to maintain industrial equipment, is set to go public at a $1.4 billion valuation.

The company announced the upcoming listing late Thursday. ServiceMax will float its shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company or SPAC called Pathfinder Acquisition Corp. that’s backed by investment firms HGGC and Industry Ventures. A SPAC is also known as a blank-check company, an entity created by investors for the specific goal of taking an established business public.

ServiceMax traces its roots back to 2007, when a software consulting firm run at the time by the company’s founders won a project to develop an application for managing a customer’s equipment maintenance operations. That application became ServiceMax’s first product. Over the next few years, it raised more than $200 million from investors before being acquired by GE in 2016 for $915 million.

ServiceMax changed hands again in 2018 when GE agreed to sell a majority stake in the company to Silver Lake. The private equity firm owns most of the company to this day, while GE controls a 10% stake and Salesforce.com Inc. maintains a stake of unspecified size through its Salesforce Ventures investment arm. ServiceMax had originally built its software on Salesforce’s customer relationship management platform and the cloud giant was an early investor in the startup.

Today, ServiceMax offers not one but an entire lineup of software-as-a-service products for managing equipment maintenance operations. Its products are used by big names such as GE, Dish Network Corp., Sony Group Corp. and Schneider Electric SE, along with hundreds of others. 

ServiceMax’s products focus on two main tasks. The first is streamlining the equipment maintenance process, while the other is managing related administrative chores such as drawing up maintenance contracts.

For the first task, ServiceMax provides a browser-based dispatching tool that can be used to assign repair requests to maintenance personnel. The tool automatically calculates the fastest route from a technician’s present location to the facility where the malfunctioning equipment is located. After arriving at the facility, the technician can use a mobile app provided by ServiceMax app to access technical information about the equipment.

The company provides a second set of tools for managing the back-office tasks involved in delivering maintenance services to customers. One tool enables companies to create templates of their maintenance contracts, which reduces the amount of time needed to prepare a warranty agreement for a new customer. Another tracks a company’s inventory of spare parts, helping ensure that technicians always have a sufficient quantity of components to carry out repairs. 

“ServiceMax enables life as we know it to happen, uninterrupted, by empowering some of the world’s biggest and most well-known suppliers, distributors and manufacturers to provide consistent and reliable service to their customers,” said ServiceMax Chief Executive Officer Neil Barua. “We’ve seen original equipment manufacturers and operators increase their focus on digital transformation and we believe that ServiceMax is well positioned to support those needs by leveraging our 10-plus years of focus on complex service management.”

The slice of the software market in which the company competes, Barua added, is estimated to be worth $9 billion.

The merger with Pathfinder Acquisition will see ServiceMax receive about $335 million that the blank-check company has raised from investors. ServiceMax will use a portion of the funds to acquire rival LiquidFrameworks Inc. in a deal it also announced this week. The company is paying $145 million for LiquidFrameworks, a fellow provider of software for managing equipment maintenance that focuses specifically on the energy sector.

ServiceMax plans to spend the remaining capital from the merger on growth initiatives and general corporate purposes. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

ServiceMax competes with a number of other companies in the maintenance orchestration software market, including investor Salesforce. The cloud giant provides a number of features similar to the one offered by ServiceMax in its Service Cloud platform, including a dispatching tool that helps assign repair requests to technicians. 

Photo: ServiceMax