Picture a small office in San Sebastián, Spain. The year is 2010. A handful of people are sitting around a table, talking about something most homes didn’t have yet — a way to control your lights, your heating, and your plugs from your phone.
That idea became Wattio. And its story is not the story you’d expect.
It’s not a tale about a company that’s still around today, still shipping boxes, still answering emails. It shut its doors in 2023. But for over a decade, Wattio was one of the most talked-about smart home brands in Spain. It raised real money. It won real awards. It got into thousands of homes.
Then it disappeared.
This is the full story — how it started, what it built, who backed it, and why it eventually couldn’t keep the lights on.
Quick Facts
| Detail | Information |
| Founded | 2010 |
| Founder | Patxi Echeveste |
| Headquarters | San Sebastián (Donostia), Basque Country, Spain |
| Industry | Smart home devices, energy monitoring, elderly care tech |
| Brand name | Wattio (legal name: Wattiocorp SL) |
| Main products | POD smart plug, THERMIC thermostat, GATE hub, BAT energy monitor, door/motion/smoke/water sensors |
| Total funding raised | Roughly €4.5 million |
| Key investors | Repsol, CDTI, Ezten FCR, plus an Indiegogo campaign |
| Homes connected (peak) | Over 5,000 |
| Connected devices (peak) | Over 20,000 |
| Employees (peak) | Around 25 |
| Major pivot | From general smart homes to elderly care monitoring (Wattio Conecta, 2019) |
| Status | Shut down / entered liquidation, May 2023 |
How It All Started
Patxi Echeveste wasn’t a stranger to energy. He came from that world already, and he kept noticing the same gap.
People had no real way to see how much power they were using. Not at the moment. Not in a logical manner.
So in 2010, he started Wattio. The goal was simple to say but hard to build: let anyone check their home’s energy use from a phone, and let them turn things off remotely too.
It took years to get there. Three and a half years of work went into the first real product, tested and refined before it ever reached a store shelf.
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The First Product Finally Arrives
By 2013, Wattio had something to show the world. It launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, and people responded. The campaign pulled in more than €90,000.
That’s not life-changing money for a hardware company. But it proved something important — strangers on the internet believed in this idea enough to pay for it before it even existed.
Around the same time, a Basque public investment fund called Ezten FCR put in half a million euros. Wattio now had real backers, not just enthusiastic crowdfunders.
What the System Actually Did
Wattio’s first big release was called SmartHome 360º. The name was a mouthful, but the idea behind it was easy to picture.
It had four main pieces, and each one did its own job.
- POD — a smart plug. It could switch appliances on or off from anywhere, on a timer or in real time. If your toddler was supposed to be doing homework and the TV clicked on instead, POD could let you know.
- THERMIC — a thermostat that ran on batteries and slotted right into your existing wiring. No electrician needed for a full rewire.
- GATE — the brain of the operation. A small touchscreen hub that tied everything together and talked to the cloud.
- BAT — an energy meter that lives inside your home’s electrical box. It watched up to three circuits and compared your usage against similar homes nearby.
Put together, the system let you do things that felt almost playful for 2014. You could set a “presence simulator” to make your home look occupied while you were away on vacation, scaring off anyone thinking about breaking in.
It also helped you cut your bill. Standby power — all those little device lights blinking away at 2 a.m. — adds up over a year. Wattio’s pitch was that the system would pay for itself within twelve months through savings like that.
Money Starts Rolling In
Word got around. By early 2015, Wattio announced a fresh €1.25 million investment from private investors. The company described them only as experienced local business leaders, without naming names.
That round came on top of everything raised before — the Indiegogo money, the Ezten investment. Wattio was no longer just an idea with a prototype. It had real capital behind it and a product already sitting on shelves at Leroy Merlin, plus a listing on Amazon in the United States.
The company’s CFO at the time, Telmo Sexmilo, gave an interview around this period that’s worth pausing on. He talked about something a lot of hardware startups learn the hard way — that crowdfunding is mostly a marketing tool, not a real funding strategy, especially once you need to actually build and ship physical products at scale.
Additionally, he gestured at Nest, the smart thermostat business that Google recently acquired. His read on it was sharp: Nest had a great product, but no real platform underneath it, which is part of why Nest then went and bought a separate hub company. Wattio, he argued, was building hardware and software together from day one, so it wouldn’t face that same gap.
Growing Into a Real Business
By the time three years had passed since launch, Wattio had converted more than 5,000 homes across Spain into what the company liked to call “hogares inteligentes” — smart homes. Over 20,000 individual devices were connected and reporting data.
The product line kept expanding too. New sensors came out for smoke and flooding, nicknamed Smoke and Water, shown off at the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona. These joined the existing lineup of door sensors, motion sensors, and a siren meant to scare off intruders.
Wattio wasn’t just selling to individual homeowners either. The company equipped more than sixty vacation apartments in Baqueira Beret, a ski resort area in Lleida, to manage heating and energy use automatically. It branched into pharmacies and clothing shops too, monitoring energy use in commercial spaces, not just living rooms.
The company also linked its system up with IFTTT, a popular automation platform. That meant you could set up rules like turning on your alarm the moment everyone’s phone left the house, or warming up the heating the second your GPS showed you driving home.
A Big Name Steps In: Repsol
Something occurred in August 2018 that caught the attention of Spain’s startup community. Repsol — yes, the massive oil and energy company — announced it was putting money into Wattio.
Repsol partnered with CDTI, a Spanish government body focused on industrial technology development, and together they invested €2 million into the company. Repsol’s share alone was valued at €1.5 million.
Why would an oil giant care about a smart plug company? It made more sense than it first sounds. Repsol was in the middle of reshaping itself into what it called a multi-energy provider, buying up electricity and gas businesses and aiming for millions of retail customers by 2025. A smart home company that already had a foothold inside thousands of houses fit neatly into that plan.
For Wattio, the deal meant resources to grow in three directions: build new devices, hire experienced international sales staff, and expand its data and partnership capabilities.
The Pivot Nobody Saw Coming: Caring for the Elderly
In May 2019, Wattio made a turn that set it apart from every other smart plug company on the market. It launched Wattio Conecta.
This wasn’t about turning off your lights from the couch anymore. Conecta was built to quietly watch over elderly relatives — without making them wear a single sensor or gadget on their body.
The system used four devices: a sensor on the front door, a motion sensor, a sensor on the TV, and a central hub tying it all together. Using artificial intelligence and pattern recognition, it learned a person’s daily routine. Did Mom usually open the fridge by 8 a.m.? Did Dad usually watch his shows by 6 p.m.? If those patterns broke unexpectedly, the system would flag it and alert family members.
This was Wattio’s answer to a real and growing problem. Families increasingly live far apart. Aging parents often live alone. Traditional wearables for elderly monitoring get forgotten, left on a nightstand, or simply refused by people who don’t want to feel watched. Conecta tried to solve that by staying invisible.
It’s worth sitting with how thoughtful that idea actually was. Nobody wants to feel like a patient in their own home. Without making an aging parent feel constantly watched, Wattio created something that could provide comfort to an anxious son or daughter.
Things Start to Crack
Here’s where the story turns. Building hardware is brutally expensive. Building hardware as a small company competing against giants is even harder. And pivoting your entire business model, even for a genuinely good reason like elderly care, takes money and time that startups don’t always have a surplus of.
By the early 2020s, the cracks were showing. According to later reporting, Wattio had shifted its focus from general smart home hardware to the teleassistance and elderly monitoring side of the business. Despite having closed funding rounds totaling more than €4 million over its lifetime, the company couldn’t stay financially afloat.
One Spanish business outlet described Wattio bluntly as what had been, just a decade earlier, probably the standout startup of the entire Basque Country. That’s a hard sentence to read if you followed the company’s rise. It’s also an honest one.
The Final Email
On May 5, 2023, Wattio sent an email to its customers. The company was shutting down.
Just like that, every POD, THERMIC unit, GATE hub, and BAT monitor in thousands of homes across Spain lost its connection to the internet. The mobile app stopped working. There were no more clouds behind it. Hardware that had once promised to make a home smarter became, almost overnight, a box of plastic and circuit boards that did nothing.
The company thanked its customers for their trust over the years. It was a quiet, polite ending to a story that had once involved oil company investments and government grants.
Online forums lit up with frustration afterward. Fairly, some pointed out that this was not a novel issue in the realm of smart homes. Other companies — like Insteon, mentioned by name in some of the discussion — had pulled the same disappearing act before. When a smart home company folds, your “smart” devices don’t become dumb devices you can still use manually. Often, they just become dead weight.
That’s a real lesson buried in Wattio’s story, and it applies to every smart home gadget you might buy today. If the product depends entirely on a company’s servers staying online forever, you’re trusting that company’s survival just as much as you’re trusting its technology.
What Wattio Got Right
It’s easy to focus only on the ending. But that wouldn’t be fair to what the company actually built.
Wattio designed and made its own hardware and software in-house, rather than slapping a label on someone else’s factory product. That gave it real flexibility — it could add new devices, fix problems quickly, and customize things for big clients like telecom companies or insurers.
It also moved early into elderly care tech, years before “aging in place” became the buzzword it is now. The idea behind Wattio Conecta — caring for someone without making them feel surveilled — was ahead of its time, and similar ideas have only grown more popular since.
And for years, it genuinely delivered value. Thousands of real families used Wattio to lower their bills, keep an eye on their homes while traveling, and check in on aging parents from a distance. That’s not nothing.
What This Story Teaches Us
Hardware startups live a different life than software startups. You can’t just push an update overnight and fix everything. Every new feature might mean a new circuit board, a new factory run, a new round of testing.
Wattio also shows how even strong backing isn’t a guarantee. Government grants, oil company money, crowdfunding success, retail shelf space — Wattio had pieces that most startups would dream of having. None of it was enough in the end.
There’s also a quieter lesson about trust. When you buy a “smart” device, you’re not just buying plastic and wires. You’re buying a promise that a company’s servers will keep running. Wattio’s shutdown is a reminder that promises can break.
Final Words
Wattio’s story isn’t a simple win or a simple loss. It’s somewhere in between, the way most real company stories actually are.
It started with a good question — why don’t we know how much power we’re using right now? It grew into something used by thousands of households across Spain. It caught the eye of one of the country’s biggest energy companies. It tried to solve a deeply human problem with its elderly care pivot. After that, the path ran out.
If you ever owned a Wattio device, it probably sat quietly in a drawer somewhere now, disconnected and unused. If you never heard of it before today, you’ve just learned about a small piece of Spain’s tech history that mattered more than most people realize.
The smart home gadgets that so many of us use on a daily basis were made possible by companies like Wattio. That’s worth remembering, even after the lights went out.
FAQs
1.What was Wattio?
Wattio was a Spanish smart home company founded in 2010 in San Sebastián. It made devices for monitoring energy use, controlling appliances remotely, and later, watching over elderly relatives.
2.Who founded Wattio?
Patxi Echeveste founded the company in 2010, building on his background in the energy sector.
3.Is Wattio still in business today?
No. Wattio shut down in May 2023 and stopped all internet services for its devices.
4.What products did Wattio sell?
Its main system, SmartHome 360º, included a smart plug (POD), a thermostat (THERMIC), a central hub (GATE), and an energy monitor (BAT). Subsequently, motion, door, smoke, and water sensors were added.
5.What was Wattio Conecta?
It was a 2019 product made to monitor elderly people’s daily routines using sensors on doors, motion detectors, and TV sensors, without requiring any wearable device.
6.How much money did Wattio raise overall?
Across its lifetime, Wattio raised roughly €4.5 million from a mix of crowdfunding, public funds, and private investors.
7.Did Repsol really invest in a smart home company?
Yes. In August 2018, Repsol and the Spanish government body CDTI jointly invested €2 million in Wattio, with Repsol’s stake valued at €1.5 million.
8.Why did an oil company want to invest in Wattio?
Repsol was repositioning itself as a multi-energy provider at the time, expanding into electricity and gas retail. A smart home company already inside thousands of houses fit that strategy.
9.How many homes used Wattio at its peak?
Reports from around 2018 put the number at over 5,000 homes in Spain, with more than 20,000 connected devices.
10.Why did Wattio eventually shut down?
Public reporting points to financial struggles after the company pivoted from general smart home hardware toward elderly care and teleassistance devices, despite years of funding rounds.
11.What happened to people who already owned Wattio devices?
Once the company shut its servers down, the devices lost internet connectivity and the mobile app stopped working, leaving the hardware unable to function as intended.
12.Is “Wattio” the same as “Wattios”?
No, and this trips people up. “Wattio” was the real company. “Wattios” is simply the Spanish plural word for “watts,” the unit of electrical power — it isn’t a brand or a product.
13.Did Wattio work with smart assistants like Alexa or Google Home?
Wattio integrated with the automation platform IFTTT, which allowed indirect connections to various smart routines, rather than offering direct native Alexa or Google Assistant support as a core feature.
14.What made Wattio different from other smart home brands?
It built both its hardware and software in-house, rather than relying on outside manufacturers, which gave it more control over features and how quickly it could adapt its products.
15.Where was Wattio based?
San Sebastián, in the Basque Country of northern Spain, also known locally as Donostia.
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