Tado, a European competitor to Google-owned Nest and local smart thermostat companies, such as the UK’s Heatmiser or Hive from British Gas, has topped up its funding today, disclosing a new €10 million (13.6m) round. The new investment comes from existing backers Target Partners, and Shortcut Ventures, along with a number of other unnamed investors, and will be used by the German startup to bring its smart heating and AC products to more European markets.
“With the new funds we strive to expand our leadership in intelligent climate control,” co-founder and CEO Christian Deilmann tells me mid-flight between Munich and San Francisco. Specifically, he says the company’s first product — the Tado heating — will be brought to more of Northern Europe, adding to existing availability in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK.
More recently, the startup launched the Tado Cooling via a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. The move was designed to test the market, in particular the U.S., helping to measure the appetite for such a product and match this to production, rather than for the capital per se, as many hardware companies do.
“Forecasting volumes for Tado Cooling — a brand new product category — on an international level is very difficult,” Deilmann said at the time. “Kickstarter gives us the chance to scale production to the right volume after receiving the orders.”
As an update to how that campaign went, Deilmann tells me 50 per cent of its Kickstarter backers, who ponied up over $200,000, came from the U.S., followed by Singapore and Southern Europe, and that these countries will be the focus for the Tado Cooling going forward.
Meanwhile, Tado’s closest competitor in the smart AC space is probably Sensibo, which is currently crowdfunding on IndieGoGo.