PE’s investing in fire. So are we.

A CEO's take on M&A trends in the fire industry, the opportunity that’s up for grabs, and why we just opened a Denver hub.

By Aidan Lister

I've spent the last decade building the operating system for fire protection maintenance companies. It's an unsexy niche: most people don’t know it exists, it doesn’t get media attention or VC interest … which is why it’s perfect. And now it’s hotting up.

The fire industry’s on fire right now

Vertical specific software is hot right now. Earlier this year, TA Associates acquired Brycer at a whopping valuation rumored to be north of $500M USD.

And it’s not just the software companies getting the attention, private equity has clued onto the fact that these maintenance businesses are great to own: regulatory-required maintenance, predictable recurring revenue, growing year on year. In 2025, M&A activity in fire and life safety jumped 66.7% year over year to around 125 transactions (Capstone Partners).

Excitingly, Uptick is increasingly the software chosen to run those consolidated businesses.

Nobody else built for this niche

Fire protection is the smallest and most complex slice of facility management. Around 3% of the roughly $3 trillion global FM spend goes to fire, per JLL's 2025 report. That's a niche.

The "small" part is only half the story. The other half is that fire is unlike anything else in field services. In the US alone, there are 43,000 Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs), each with its own reporting requirements. There’s scores of applicable standards, and each standard has multiple editions, with states deciding which edition to use. Compliance is not a form. It's a system.

That combination, small market with extreme complexity, is why generic job-management platforms have looked at fire, run the math, and walked away. It doesn't make commercial sense for them to build for the specific requirements of the niche. They either avoid it entirely or bolt on shallow features that never quite fit.

Meanwhile, the businesses actually doing the work, the contractors and technicians inspecting and maintaining sprinklers, alarms, extinguishers, and every life-safety asset in your building, have been running on some combination of spreadsheets, paper, and generic tools that weren't built for their world.

That's the gap we built Uptick for.

The origin story that matters

We started in Australia, a small and heavily regulated fire market. If you want to build software that serves it, you have to encode the full compliance complexity from day one. There is no shortcut.

From there it was a short jump into New Zealand with its own set of standards. Then the UK. Then Ireland. By the time we entered the US and Canada, we already had a multi-country, multi-standard compliance framework, and a comprehensive job management solution with ERP-like features … whereas our competitors had one or the other (compliance, or comprehensive job management).

Where we sit today

Uptick is an operating system for fire protection supporting all the standards: NFPA, AES, JCO, and ULC. All-in-one. Purpose-built. We didn't bolt tools together or adapt a generic field-service product to fire. We built the product around the actual complexity of the work: inspections across every asset type, jurisdictional compliance forms, asset and defect tracking, quoting, scheduling, an offline-first technician mobile app, comprehensive management reporting, and a customer portal for the building owner. One system.

There’s a philosophical difference between us and our competitors too. They think in jobs. We think in facilities. With Uptick, every data point about a building rolls up to the owner. Owners see their entire portfolio, every defected asset, and their compliance status in one place. The end state isn't a completed job. It's a safer building. And ultimately, that’s why we exist. Our mission is to make 100 million people safer, where they live, work, and play.

How we’re tracking so far:

• 200+ North American fire protection companies run on Uptick, in all 50 US states and across Canada.
• 1,000+ customers globally use our software to maintain more than 2.7 million buildings.
• More than 42 million assets are tracked in Uptick across three continents.
• Our US team has grown past 40 people over the last two years, with another 50% expansion planned by the end of 2027.
• Gross retention is 97%. In software terms, that means once a customer picks us, they stay.

What comes next

On July 29, we opened our Denver hub. It's the anchor for our next stage of North American growth. We're backed by US-based PSG Equity and we're investing seriously in domestic R&D. Our AI investment sits alongside that, and it's global. Earlier this year we shipped the AI Scheduler to all Uptick customers as our first flagship AI feature. It plans an entire month of work in a single click. There's more coming in the AI category and we'll talk about it when it's ready.

The global fire industry is entering a phase of real capital, real consolidation, and real technology adoption. We think we're well positioned for what's coming, particularly in North America. If you own or run a fire protection business, we'd like to talk to you.