What does "tado°" mean – and how did it all begin?

The one frustration that started everything

The idea for tado° was born in a shared student apartment at MIT in Cambridge. It was around 2008, when our co-founder Christian Deilmann was studying Mechanical Engineering.

In a shared student apartment, an annoying question surfaced during hot summer days: Leave the AC running all day so the apartment was cool when everyone got home? Or switch it off, save energy, and come back to a heated-up flat? Christian and his flatmates kept going back and forth. At some point, he started wondering: isn't there a smarter way? A device that handles this automatically?

At university, he spent time researching global energy flows, where he learned something that stuck with him: About a third of all energy consumed worldwide goes to heating and cooling buildings. And most of that energy is being wasted.

Back in Germany, the same issue occurred – but with his heating running all day unnecessarily. He kept coming back to the idea of the smart device and frequently discussed it with his fellow TU Munich student Johannes Schwarz.  Eventually, they decided to go for it. The first prototypes were made in their living rooms and tested on friends and family.

How we came up with the name "tado°"

One day, the founding team sat together in a Japanese restaurant having lunch, thinking through what to name the company they were about to build. A friend who joined them for lunch mentioned the Japanese word "tadaima" (ただいま) – a greeting used when you arrive home, roughly meaning "I'm back" or "I'm home." The natural response, from whoever is already inside, is "okaeri" (おかえり) – "welcome back" – expressing happiness at the returning person's arrival. Everyone instantly loved the idea.

We believe that coming home is one of those small but important moments in daily life – and we wanted to make it better. With geofencing – our first feature – you walk through the door and the temperature is already perfect, without you having to think about it. And while you were away, tado° has quietly been saving energy. "Tadaima" and "okaeri" felt like the perfect words to name that idea. However, we wanted something short and easy to say in any language. This is how we landed on "tado."

From idea to European market leader

We shipped our very first product in November 2012, initially across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The UK followed in 2013. Back then, the idea was straightforward: your heating should respond to real life, not a fixed schedule. It should heat up when the first person arrives at home and turn the heating down when the last one leaves. And never use more energy than necessary.

In 2022, we took a significant step beyond smart thermostats by acquiring Austrian energy tech company aWATTar, bringing dynamic electricity tariffs into our platform. By now, we are even offering Smart EV Charging and PV tariffs. With that, we are ensuring the energy powering your home is cheaper and clean.

As Christian Deilmann put it in our most recent profitability announcement:

"Energy prices and energy security have once again become central topics in Europe. The cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one you never consume."

As you see, the initial idea has not changed, but the scale has. Today, more than 5.5 million tado° Smart Thermostats are connected across over one million homes. On average, our users reduce their heating consumption by 22%¹. Across all those homes, the cumulative CO₂ savings add up to approximately 3.1 million tonnes.

Our milestones so far

What’s next?

We are no longer a smart thermostat company in the traditional sense. We are set to building a home energy management platform. One that brings together heating, cooling, dynamic electricity pricing, electric vehicle charging, and solar photovoltaic management into a single, intelligent system.

As Johannes Schwarz said:

"Our goal is simple: to help households not only reduce their energy consumption, but also significantly lower their energy costs."

And Christian Deilmann:

"Homes are becoming energy hubs. Our goal is to bring heating, solar power, electric vehicles and energy tariffs together into one intelligent system that helps households save money while supporting the transition to renewable energy."

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¹ Based on internal data averaged across all tado° customers, collected up to 30/11/2023.