Software might be eating the world, but it’s taking some industries longer than others to realize its full potential.
From iPhones to Teslas, people have grown accustomed to software updates improving the stuff they already own. But outside consumer electronics and automobiles, over-the-air updates aren’t commonplace yet.
Yet that’s beginning to change, starting with an unlikely product: heat pumps. Last week, heat pump startup Quilt said that it pushed an update last week to heat pumps already installed in customers’ homes. It wasn’t just a bug fix either: the new software and firmware boosted the units’ heating and cooling capacities overnight by more than 20%.
“From the very beginning, we wanted to design the systems to be able to be continuously improved, updated over the air. It’s a pattern that’s happened in EVs and gotten a lot of traction, but no one had really done that before in HVAC,” Quilt CEO Paul Lambert told TechCrunch.
“In cars, sometimes they call it software-defined vehicles. We feel like we’ve created software-defined HVAC,” he added.
It can be hard to prove a negative, but according to heat pump expert Drew Tozer, the update is likely the first of its kind. Typically, when a heat pump is installed — or any piece of HVAC equipment — the only time it’s touched is when there’s a problem.
But many on Quilt’s team didn’t come from a traditional HVAC background. Instead, they were drawn from Nest, Google, Apple, and Tesla, companies where frequent updates are the norm. Isaac McQuillen, the engineer who led the capacity increase project, worked most recently at Lucid Motors, where he managed heating and cooling for both passengers and batteries.
Techcrunch event Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025 Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before Sept 26 to save up to $668. Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025 Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before Sept 26 to save up to $668. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW
“We got some feedback from both [installation] partners and some customers that it’d be really useful if we were able to have a slightly higher maximum operating capacity,” McQuillen said. Some people had larger living rooms or open floorpans that were more demanding. So the team dug in to see if the heat pumps had a little extra to give.
Quilt had specified more and higher quality sensors than what is normally found in residential HVAC systems, including additional pressures sensors, higher accuracy temperature and current sensors, McQuillen said. That data was key to the project.
... continue reading