Mike Harpenau
Maintenance technician since 1994. Worked the floor at automotive, aerospace, and food & beverage plants. Taught himself to code to solve the problems he lived every day.
The Problem We Lived
When a machine breaks at 2 AM, you don't have time to dig through filing cabinets or wait for the day shift engineer. You need answers now.
Maintenance technicians are expected to be experts on every machine in the plant. But the knowledge is scattered — in binders nobody reads, in the heads of people who retired, in vendor manuals written in three languages.
"I spent 30 years watching good technicians struggle with bad information systems. I built FactoryLM because I was that technician."
Our Approach
FactoryLM is different because we start from the technician's reality:
- Photo-first. You're already taking photos of fault codes. Now those photos actually do something.
- No training required. If you can use a smartphone, you can use FactoryLM.
- Works offline. Factory floors don't always have WiFi. Our edge devices work without it.
- Affordable. We're not building for Fortune 500 budgets. We're building for real plants.
The Vision
We believe AI should be inside the brain of maintenance operations — not bolted on as an afterthought. That means:
- AI that captures tribal knowledge before it walks out the door
- Diagnostics that learn from every repair, getting smarter over time
- Tools accessible enough that a Boy Scout can earn a merit badge building with them
Get in Touch
Want to see FactoryLM in action? Have questions about how it could work in your plant?