Prior to starting Tractian, they worked at a paper manufacturer, International Paper, as software engineers, where Marinelli says that they noticed how backwards the systems were for monitoring machinery health.“Industrial managers of any kind need traceability of work orders, and need to know the health of their machines from kilometers away from the operations,” Marinelli said. Tractian provides sensors that attach to — and send data about — machines via 3G or 4G cellular networks. Tractian currently has 100 employees and it expects to expand its headcount to 200 in the next 18 months. Founded in 2019, Tractian is the brainchild of Y Combinator alumni Marinelli and Gabriel Lameirinhas. Marinelli readily acknowledges that Tractian isn’t the first to the machine analytics space.