We built Watsynq because the bearing failure was preventable.

In 2021, Ethan Morales was leading reliability engineering at a heavy manufacturing facility in the Phoenix area. A ball mill pinion gear failure caused a 72-hour unplanned shutdown. The cost: roughly $800,000 in lost production, emergency labour, and expedited parts.

The post-mortem was what drove everything that came next. The acoustic emission data — had anyone been measuring it continuously — would have shown stress wave activity three weeks earlier. The oil particle count had been trending upward for a month. The thermal asymmetry had started shifting two weeks before the failure. The data existed. It just wasn't connected, and nobody was watching all three streams in combination.

Ethan spent the following two years talking to reliability engineers at mining, cement, and chemical processing facilities across the Southwest. The pattern held everywhere: route-based vibration rounds every 2-4 weeks, quarterly oil samples sent off-site, no continuous AE monitoring, and a reactive maintenance backlog that everyone accepted as normal. The sensors and physics to do better existed. The integration to make it practical for a working reliability engineer did not.

He co-founded Watsynq in Phoenix in 2023 with Yuki Tanaka, a signal processing engineer who had spent the previous decade building embedded sensor fusion systems for industrial IoT. The goal was specific: one RUL number the maintenance planner trusts, delivered six weeks before the vibration analyst would have seen it — with a confidence interval and a source trace, not a black box.

Watsynq is not a vibration monitoring service with an oil add-on. It is not a general industrial IoT platform. It does one thing: fuse three sensor physics domains into a single remaining-useful-life number for critical rotating equipment, and deliver that number into the workflow the maintenance team already uses.

Founded 2023. Phoenix, AZ.