Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg, who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Angelica M. Bermudez & Mauricio Grisales, founders of Esencia Property Maintenance System, a technology-driven platform transforming how multifamily property managers and service providers connect, manage, and execute maintenance with efficiency and transparency..

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

Esencia Property Maintenance System is a technology-driven platform transforming how multifamily property managers and service providers connect, manage, and execute maintenance with efficiency and transparency.

What inspired you to launch your company?

Mauricio and I started a cleaning company 15 years ago, serving the multifamily industry and communities with their day-to-day needs. Over the years, we grew into a one-stop shop for all property maintenance, and along the way we saw firsthand how fragmented and manual the industry really is—creating inefficiencies for managers and limiting opportunities for service providers.

That experience inspired us to think beyond providing services and work toward building a real solution for the industry. We deeply understand the pain points of both managers and service providers because we’ve lived them ourselves. Today, we’re on a mission to transform the multifamily maintenance industry—making it a better place to work and a better place to live.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Property maintenance is still highly manual, with little visibility, poor coordination, and unnecessary costs. With Esencia, we centralize and systemize the process—making it easier for property managers to get work done while empowering service providers to grow their businesses.

What excites us every day is knowing that our platform is helping people: managers gain peace of mind, residents enjoy living in well-maintained communities, and service providers have the opportunity to build sustainable livelihoods.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

Our biggest challenge is shifting from a service company to building a scalable technology platform. We’re overcoming it by staying rooted in our vision and purpose, stepping out of our comfort zone, and embracing the bigger mission of transforming an entire industry.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We’re in the process of analyzing and redesigning a new version of our platform—one that includes service providers of all sizes and offers solutions tailored even for smaller property management companies. Our vision goes beyond Florida: the next phase is to scale across the state and ultimately nationwide, making Esencia the go-to solution for multifamily property maintenance.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Stay close to the problem you’re solving. It’s easy to get distracted by big visions or caught up in the glamour of building a tech solution. Don’t be afraid to solve the problem manually at first until you find the proven way to automate it. At the end of the day, customers care about results—so do whatever it takes to make it happen.

Why Florida?

We are Colombian immigrants who came to Tampa chasing the American dream, and this city has truly blessed us. Tampa is where we started our first cleaning company, became part of the growth of the multifamily industry, and welcomed our two beautiful children. It’s the perfect place to raise our family and to build a company that can scale nationally. Tampa Bay isn’t just where we do business—it’s home.