Grease is the industrial lifeblood of mining, yet it is often overlooked. GreaseBoss is changing that perception by turning a dirty job into a precise science.
Grease is often a sticky subject around mining sites. It is the lifeblood that keeps machines humming and powers the sector, and has so for centuries, yet its necessity is often undervalued.
Brisbane start-up GreaseBoss, however, has identified its value and applied Silicon Valley-level digital strategy to the age-old lubricant.
The company’s goal is to modernise grease application by removing the guesswork from both manual and automatic lubrication and save millions for Australia’s biggest miners. Essentially, GreaseBoss turns an ordinary grease gun into a smart grease gun, like a smartphone or smart TV.
“Grease is perceived as being very low level,” GreaseBoss chief executive officer Tim Hall said. “But the more you’re in mining, the more you realise it is just so critical for almost every piece of equipment in the industry that’s operating.”
In six short years, Hall and his co-founders have scaled GreaseBoss on a simple premise: turning the “ignored and pushed to the side” task into a science.
To get there, they rubbed shoulders – digitally at least – with some of Mountain View, California’s most prominent tech thinkers. GreaseBoss knows its market, and the company attracted interest from the get-go. What began at a Brisbane Start-Up conference led to an invitation to San Francisco’s Y Combinator, the same think tank that launched Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Stripe, DoorDash, and Instacart. Y Combinator is the world’s most highly regarded startup accelerator.
“There were five of us who were pretty well all strangers, and we got together around the problem of using technology to prevent equipment failures,” Hall said. “Getting into Y Combinator in 20221 was a big thing. That was a huge shot in the arm for the company and really helped us slingshot and go hard.”
Being a part of Y Combinator remotely presented its challenges, but Hall embraced the dual time zones that he was working in and supercharged GreaseBoss’ early development.
“We were the second remote batch that they ever did during COVID, so I was waking up at 3:30am in the morning to get on Silicon Valley time,” Hall said.
“And while I was doing the courses and being a part of all the calls in the morning, I was also in my garage with electronics, building the product and then working through until about 6 pm at night.”
From those early garage sessions, the company’s evolution was dictated by the miners themselves. GreaseBoss initially launched with a focus on verifying manual greasing, effectively digitising the clipboard.
“That was working well, but we had then customers saying, ‘We need a solution to monitor our automatic lubricators’,” Hall said. “So, we developed our endpoint solution and took that to market, and it’s been extremely popular.”
The natural progression didn’t stop at fixed plants. Miners who saw the value in monitoring stationary assets soon demanded the same visibility for their mobile fleets: the excavators and haul trucks that are the primary movers of ore.
“They really needed it for mobile equipment,” Hall said. “Their excavators and their haul trucks were having repeated grease-related failures.”
A recent case study involving a Komatsu PC7000 excavator illustrates exactly why this demand existed. The site was experiencing repeated failures of hoist cylinders and bucket pins, dragging down asset availability. Maintenance teams suspected insufficient greasing but were flying blind, forcing them to double their injectors in a desperate attempt to fix the problem.
GreaseBoss installed their Endpoint MP2 monitoring units, which provide advanced monitoring for injector and distributor-based lubrication systems, on the snake pit and H-Link to monitor the hoist cylinders. By verifying grease flow, detecting hose failures, and tracking system health, the units ensured the right amount of grease reached each critical component.
The data highlighted a critical issue with the lube system pump feeding the hoist cylinders. Sensors detected a pattern of intermittent pump activity followed by long periods of silence, eventually traced to a faulty cable harness.
By catching this failure early, the system prevented serious wear on high-value components, saving the customer an estimated $10 million in potential equipment failure.
The technology has proven equally revealing in haulage fleets. In a pilot program targeting CAT 793 and CAT 789 trucks plagued by systemic A-frame bearing failures, GreaseBoss uncovered a triple threat of maintenance issues that manual checks had missed.
On the first truck, data flagged a faulty grease pump immediately. Once replaced, the system uncovered a secondary issue where injectors were bypassing, pumping 250cc of grease per cycle instead of the required 50cc.
On a second truck, the data revealed the pump timer was set to a 60-minute cycle instead of the required 30 minutes, effectively halving the lubrication the truck received.
Bulk Flow monitoring also detected the grease tanks running dry twice, a situation that would previously have left the truck operating without grease for approximately 250 hours every fortnight.
To survive in these environments, Hall adheres to a design philosophy he calls ‘SIRR’: Simple, Intuitive, Robust & Reliable.
“Mining has got some of the harshest conditions in the world for hardware,” Hall said. “The technology has to reflect these challenges.”
To address this, the company utilises ‘store and forward’ technology. This ensures that even in deep underground dead zones, data is captured and synced once connectivity is restored. Innovation continues with the launch of their new ‘swap top’ architecture this year.
“When it comes to changing batteries, you literally just take the electronics top off the flow metre body, bolt in a new one,” Hall said. This allows customers to upgrade their tech stack and battery capacity simultaneously without removing the mechanical flow meters from the machine.
Crucially, the technology addresses a major safety risk. Hall highlights that most hand-crush injuries in mining occur during non-routine maintenance, often while fixing the very failures GreaseBoss aims to prevent.
The system also tackles the industry’s skills shortage, empowering less experienced workers to perform complex tasks correctly while providing digital verification to management. With expansion into North and South America planned for 2026, Hall is optimistic about the road ahead.
“We have got an incredible product roadmap,” he said. “This is only the beginning for us.”
This feature appeared in the March edition of the Mining magazine.
