Quilt rides heat pump heat wave with hefty $33M Series A

Heat pumps are having a bit of a moment. Their sales have outpaced those of gas boilers for the second year in a row, and homeowners who install them are eligible for thousands in incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. But their growth is not as rapid as it could be. Getting consumers to adopt new technologies isn’t always easy, especially when it comes to something as basic as heating and cooling.

Consumer hesitation is at the heart of Paul Lambert’s concerns as he attempts to market the new Quilt heat pump.

“No matter where someone comes from today, what situation they’re in, we want them to feel like they’re improving,” Lambert, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch .

Heat pumps are just enough different from existing heating and cooling installations to give many consumers pause. Part of this has to do with design: Most common installations use mini-splits inside the home, which are essentially large plastic devices hung high on the wall. It’s not exactly something you could proudly show off to your friends.

Quilt says its heat pump will address these concerns, promising a sleeker design that can be installed in more places in a room than competing offerings. So far, the company has only released a teaser image. This looks promising, but we’ll have to wait until the finished product is revealed on May 15 to make a final judgment. The company designed the core of the system in-house, although it works with a manufacturing partner to produce the units.

Design isn’t the only challenge facing traditional heat pumps. Many customers have been put off by the way they operate. In most homes, a single mini-split (called a “head”) handles both heating and cooling for a single room. Each head has its own thermostat or remote control, which means that if someone wants to adjust the temperature of the entire house, they have to visit each room.

Instead, Quilt centralized controls for its system. Each room still has a head, which also provides temperature sensing, but users only need a single physical control to adjust set points throughout their home. As an alternative, they can also use the Quilt app.

“If you have this thermostat in your bedroom and you want to make sure you’ve turned off the living room or you want to change the temperature in the kids’ bedroom or whatever, you just swipe over to that room and do it from the thermostat,” Lambert says. If tweaking individual rooms isn’t your cup of tea, “you can also set a temperature for the whole house using the thermostat.”

Quilt’s control configuration hints at a level of integration that most consumer heat pumps do not offer.

“It’s kind of like a mesh network for Wi-Fi, where they all work together to heat and cool the home,” Matt Knoll, co-founder and CTO, told TechCrunch. “But they also have all the control in every space.”

In addition to the usual thermostat, each Quilt head has a millimeter wave occupancy sensor. Most heat pumps include passive infrared sensors, which tend to send false vacancy signals when someone is not moving, such as when watching TV or sleeping. The Quilt sensor does not suffer from this problem. The company’s software uses data from these sensors to map the room to determine when people are present, but Lambert emphasizes that it doesn’t create an actual image.

“We don’t install cameras in anyone’s houses. They’re just signals on a chart that when interpreted simply say there’s a person here or there’s not,” he said. “This gives us a lot of confidence when rooms are empty or not, meaning we can’t waste energy heating and cooling empty rooms.”

In anticipation of its upcoming product introduction, Quilt raised a $33 million Series A round led by Energy Impact Partners and Galvanize Climate Solutions with participation from Garage Capital, Gradient Ventures, Incite Ventures, MCJ Collective , Lowercarbon Capital and “Property Brother” Drew. Scott. This is a considerable increase considering it announced a $9 million seed round less than a year ago.

The startup plans to use the new capital to expand its marketing efforts and installation capacity. Quilt’s heat pumps will be deployed in a few regions initially before expanding further. “It’s kind of like we built this basic R&D organization, now we’re growing into a real company,” Lambert said.