About AssetOS · founder's letter

Built by someone who's lived the problem.

I spent 18 years building software — ten of them inside Thales and Hitachi Rail. I've seen how enterprise CMMS rollouts actually play out: clunky interfaces, six-month implementations, and teams quietly giving up and going back to spreadsheets.

AssetOS is what I built after watching that happen one too many times.

Shane
Founder, AssetOS
S
portrait.jpg · placeholder↑ upload
18years in software,
10 in enterprise CMMS
240+plants and facilities
running AssetOS today

01The problem

Most asset-management tools were built for a different era — bloated, slow, and painful to use. They come with six-month implementations, a consultant, and a 200-page configuration guide.

So what happens? Teams give up. They go back to spreadsheets, emails, and paper binders. The software they paid for sits unused; the chaos it was meant to fix carries on regardless. I've watched this play out in transport, banking, local government, and facilities — same pattern every time.

02The approach

AssetOS isn't a venture-backed sprint to “move fast and break things.” It's built deliberately — around the person who plans Monday's work on Friday afternoon, not the enterprise committee that buys the tool. Every feature started with a real team hitting a real wall.

Everything I've learned about what works — and, more usefully, what doesn't — is baked into the product. When I had to choose between shipping a feature that would look good on the marketing site and shipping one that would actually get used, I shipped the second one. Every time.

03The vision

One platform for assets, maintenance, and compliance that teams actually want to use. Workflows. Lifecycle tracking. Compliance evidence. Reporting. All in one place — without the complexity tax.

We're just getting started. If you want to shape what comes next — the integrations, the industries we specialise in, the workflows we make first-class — I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

What AssetOS isn't

It helps to say the quiet part out loud.

Every tool positions itself by what it is. That's fine, but it's easier to know if we fit if I tell you what we're not. If any of these sound like what you need, we're probably not your best option — and that's okay.

A 12-month enterprise implementation with a dedicated consultant
Live inside a week — your team imports data themselves
A generic SaaS that does everything for everyone
Opinionated for asset, maintenance, and compliance workflows
A sales-qualification maze with a 45-minute demo gate
Start a trial, import a CSV, see your own data in 10 minutes
Venture-pressured to grow at any cost
Bootstrapped, profitable, built to be around in 10 years
A skinned 2008 ERP with a mobile app bolted on
Modern stack, responsive by design, offline-capable on field devices
Priced by seat with hidden modules and "enterprise" quotes
Flat pricing, everything included, no gotchas on the invoice
Principles

How I build.

Four principles that decide what ships and what doesn't. Every feature gets held against them.

01

Simple first

If it's not easy to use, it won't get used. Every feature earns its place or it comes out.

02

Built to last

Modern stack, clean code, no shortcuts. This isn't a prototype hoping for a Series A.

03

Customer-led

The roadmap is shaped by real problems from real teams — not a product manager's guess.

04

Transparent

No hidden fees. No gotchas. Pricing on the site is the pricing on the invoice.

Background

Eighteen years of seeing how this is done — mostly wrong.

I've worked across transport, local government, banking, startups, and large-enterprise software. AssetOS is the distillation of every lesson — and scar — from that run.

Transport
Local Government
Banking
Startups
Enterprise CMMS
Facilities Management
Asset Lifecycle
Compliance & Audits
2022 — now

Founding AssetOS

Founder, AssetOS

Designing and building AssetOS from the ground up. Writing the code, talking to every early customer, shipping the roadmap publicly.

2018 — 2022

Senior software engineer

Hitachi Rail

Asset lifecycle, inspection workflows, and compliance tooling across UK rail operators. Watched three CMMS implementations, participated in one.

2012 — 2018

Software engineer

Thales

Mission-critical systems for transport and defence. Learned what "built to last" actually requires — and what it costs when it isn't.

2008 — 2012

Earlier · startups, banking, local government

Various

Shipped internal tools, workflow systems, and a facility-management product. First real exposure to teams abandoning shiny software for a spreadsheet.

Now live — actively shipping and improving every week.
last deploy · 2h ago · v2.34.1 · changelog →
See what shipped this week

Want to shape what comes next?

I take every intro call personally for the first year of any new customer. Tell me what you run, what you've tried, and what keeps slipping — and I'll tell you honestly whether AssetOS is your best option.

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