Teenage Hacker Builds $200 Million AI Empire Transforming Industrial Maintenance

In 2010, a young Igor Marinelli sat before his Windows 98 computer, already showing signs of what would later shape his future. Unlike his peers who found joy in Atari or PlayStation games, Marinelli discovered his passion in building things. “I got extremely addicted to building stuff, for better or worse. I can never engage in video games of any kind. I remember going to a friend’s house trying to play Atari or PlayStation 1 and in just 15 minutes, and getting… bored, annoyed. Good for me because then I was just back to the computer, kind of more introspective, and just learning stuff,” Marinelli recalls.

This early inclination toward creation led to an incident that would shape his understanding of purpose. At 13, Marinelli hacked his school’s entire system, prompting a meeting between the school director and his father. “The school director called my father and said, ‘Mister Marinelli, we have a problem here. Your son just hacked our entire school system.’ And then my father said, ‘Wait a minute, did my 13-year-old boy hack your entire school system?’ Yep, you probably need to buy a better one.”

While his father appeared supportive in the moment, the car ride home brought a valuable lesson. “Son, when you stop wasting your time doing useless stuff and start applying it for a good reason, the geniuses I know have a very specific purpose behind them. Go have fun,” his father advised. This moment planted the seeds for what would eventually become Tractian, though the path there wasn’t immediate.

The Manufacturing DNA

Marinelli’s connection to manufacturing runs deep, embedded in his family history. “My father worked his whole life in manufacturing. We are from this Brazilian Italian mix of families where my grandfather worked as a mechanic for manufacturing, then my father as an electrical engineer, and you know, sort of like building the way up, 25 years in the same company, that type of thing, right? In a paper mill called International Paper.”

This heritage, combined with his early programming skills, set the foundation for his future endeavors. By age 13, he was already coding an inventory management system in PHP for a motorcycle manufacturer in Portugal. However, his path wasn’t straightforward. “I tried everything. I tried building a crowdfunding platform to help fundraise for projects, and then we pivoted for funding health treatments. Then we pivot for a software for predicting health chronic diseases, and so on and so forth. Worked with a couple of customers, had a small angel check, but nothing truly…”

Today, Tractian has evolved into what Marinelli describes as “the all-in-one industrial workspace.” The company’s mission focuses on enabling frontline workers to better understand their operations, addressing a critical gap in industrial maintenance and monitoring.

The company’s growth has been remarkable. In 2024, Tractian secured $120 million in Series C funding led by Sapphire Ventures, bringing total funding to $200 million. With 400 employees across the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, the company serves over 500 customers, including industrial giants like Bosch, Kraft Heinz, Carrier, and Hyundai.

Tractian’s approach to industrial monitoring represents a significant advancement in the field. Their Smart Trac Ultra sensors monitor machine vibration, run time, and RPM, with a unique always-listening capability that sets them apart. “One of our hardware innovations when it comes to condition monitoring is being able to always be listening to the machine. So if you think about the paradigm until now, if you don’t have a cabled sensor, all the other condition monitoring sensors are like, wake up… sample… sleep. Wake up… sample… sleep. Our sensor’s always listening for any variation,” Marinelli explains.

The impact of this technology is already evident in the field. As Gautam Sane, senior reliability engineer at CP Kelco, notes, “They primarily utilize cellular communication for their data transmission, which was very key for us being near a military base. It just fit in a lot more seamlessly to use something that’s based on cellular communication.”

The Power of AI-Assisted Maintenance

What sets Tractian apart is its sophisticated AI-assisted maintenance approach. The system goes beyond basic monitoring to provide prescriptive comparisons and detailed diagnostics. By analyzing vast amounts of data from thousands of machines, manufacturer manuals, and real-time sensor inputs, the AI delivers actionable insights that traditional maintenance methods simply cannot match.

The system’s effectiveness relies heavily on what Tractian calls “human-in-the-loop feedback.” While the AI possesses remarkable analytical capabilities, human expertise remains crucial in providing context and critical judgment. This partnership between human knowledge and artificial intelligence creates a comprehensive understanding of machinery conditions that neither could achieve alone.

The process creates a virtuous cycle of continuous learning and improvement. Each diagnosis and prognosis feeds back into the system, enhancing its ability to identify potential failures and improving accuracy over time. This sophisticated approach provides technicians with reliable, detailed prognoses for maintaining seamless operations, ultimately extending the lifecycle of industrial assets.

As Jacob Hoffine, reliability engineer at Ingredion Incorporated, observed, “The first 40 or so sensors we put on, we got initial health reports and even some, what they call insights, which is notifications of some equipment issue. We got those within the first two weeks. There were some that I would say, if not for having the sensor, we would have never noticed… For example, a lubrication problem, we could go out and lubricate it and recheck it on the Tractian platform and see that it fixed the problem… It was pretty impressive for that, the results we got early on.”

Canyon Dell’Omo, product manager at Tractian, emphasizes the company’s commitment to long-term value: “We’re here to be a major industry player over the next decade and more. So that’s the time investment that’s required. We’re more than happy to do that… I am just so enthralled by how mission driven we are and how every little thing is worth going the extra mile to make sure we accomplish what we want to accomplish.”

For Marinelli, this success circles back to his father’s early lesson about finding purpose through usefulness. The company’s growth validates his belief that true innovation comes not just from having good ideas, but from solving real problems. As he reflects on his journey from teenage hacker to CEO, Marinelli’s story embodies his father’s wisdom: purpose isn’t found in isolation, but in creating value for others.

The numbers tell their own story: Tractian reports a 17% increase in availability for its customers, payback in less than 4 months, a 38% increase in productivity, and a 30% reduction in PM costs. These metrics represent not just business success, but the realization of Marinelli’s mission to be truly useful to the manufacturing industry his family has served for generations.