From Kettles to Connected Counters: How Berlin’s Heatle Rewrote the Rules of Boiling Water
Berlin hardware startup Heatle has quietly turned one of the most mundane household devices — the kettle — into a platform for energy, design and smart-home innovation.
What started as an engineer’s irritation with overboiling and scale has matured into a production product that aims to save energy, simplify kitchen interactions and open new B2B opportunities.
Founder and chief technologist David Riding says the conventional kettle has long been wasteful. "Tea's in my DNA," Riding told Avnet Silica's We Talk IoT, explaining his motivation. He points to slow mechanical shutoffs and resistive elements insulated from the water, which lead to overfilling, long run times and unnecessary heat loss.
Heatle’s solution: move to induction and heat only what you need. Instead of a bulky resistive element, Heatle places a primary coil in the base and a metal disc as the secondary that sits in the cup.
The result is faster, more direct heating — and, the company claims, up to 80% energy savings compared with typical kettles in some use cases.
Many earlier attempts at liquid induction stalled because designers couldn’t get sufficient, reliable power from the driver circuitry. "They could only achieve a power level of about 300 watts," Riding told Avnet Silica's We Talk IoT. That limited practical use.
Riding and his team designed a custom power-electronics topology with analogue feedback and self-tuning resonance. By avoiding the looser feedback loops of common half‑bridge circuits and using fast silicon‑carbide MOSFETs supplied through partnerships such as Avnet, Heatle claims to sustain higher power safely and responsively — critical for boiling, milk warming or filling a hot-water bottle quickly.
Heatle looks nothing like a traditional kettle. The base is a slim disc about 18 cm across; small magnetic metal discs (three sizes) sit in cups or pots to act as the heater. A slender, battery‑free temperature rod uses energy harvesting to measure liquid temperature and report it over Bluetooth while the base is active.
Riding emphasises practical hygiene and convenience: the discs can calcify and the startup developed a bio‑organic cleaning kit with an NFC-tagged cleaning mode. "We're abstracting that, such that the customers find it easier to use," he told Avnet Silica's We Talk IoT.
Heatle layers simple digital interactions on top of the hardware. NFC tags embedded in consumables — tea pouches, a premium hot‑water bottle, even a future moka pot — let users tap to set power, time and temperature presets.
"You just hold the teabag near to the Heatle... it will read and set the power, time, and temperature," Riding explained on the podcast.
Connectivity is deliberately pragmatic: Bluetooth enables firmware updates and a companion app for analytics, while opt‑in telemetry helps with remote diagnostics and warranty support. Heatle measures voltage, current and power factor to report real energy usage; data collection is permissioned and privacy‑minded by design.
Beyond homes, Heatle is exploring integrations with kitchen manufacturers. The base can operate through non‑ferromagnetic worktops, and the team has prototyped undermount and sink installations as well as a magnetic remote control that charges inductively. Those options position Heatle for custom kitchen OEM deals and hospitality installations.
Riding framed the company as an ecosystem builder: hardware, consumables, accessories and firmware updates feed each other. The user community has driven many product ideas — from mulled‑wine presets to baby‑milk modes — and Heatle iterates quickly.
As Riding put it when asked why tackle kettles at all: solving an old, ubiquitous problem with better engineering can have outsized impact. "The kettle was one of the most energy hungry devices in any home," he told Avnet Silica's We Talk IoT — and Heatle hopes to make boiling water smarter, saver and more connected as a result.