Company Profile · IoT · Smart Buildings
Haltian
The Finnish IoT house that turns ordinary buildings into responsive, measurable, more sustainable places to work.
The Finnish IoT house that turns ordinary buildings into responsive, measurable, more sustainable places to work.
Walk into a modern office and it says nothing. It does not know that half its desks sit empty, that a meeting room is stuffy with carbon dioxide, or that a colleague spent twenty minutes hunting for a wheelchair down the wrong corridor. Haltian, a technology company from Oulu in northern Finland, exists to change that - to give physical spaces a nervous system and, in its own phrasing, a measure of empathy.
Founded in 2012 by a group of engineers who had built products inside Nokia, Haltian began life as a product-development house: a firm other companies hired to design connected hardware. Its early portfolio included work behind the Oura smart ring, the sleep-tracking wearable that became a fixture on Silicon Valley wrists. But somewhere in that contract work, the founders noticed a bigger, duller, more valuable problem. Buildings - offices, hospitals, warehouses - were full of questions no one could answer without data, and there was no easy way to collect it at scale.
So Haltian built the collection layer itself. Today it sells two things that work as one: Thingsee, a family of small wireless sensors, and Empathic Building, a digital twin that turns the sensors' readings into a live, human-readable map of a space. The combination has taken the company from a Finnish design shop to a global IoT provider serving roughly 400 customers across 36 countries.
The mechanics are deliberately unglamorous. Thingsee sensors are battery-powered, small enough to disappear on a ceiling or under a desk, and engineered to run for as long as a decade without maintenance. They talk to each other over a wireless mesh network and out through cellular gateways, so a customer does not have to touch their corporate Wi-Fi or run new cabling. A cloud platform manages the devices over their lifetime.
Each sensor answers one plain question. Thingsee PRESENCE reports whether a room or desk is occupied. Thingsee AIR tracks carbon dioxide, volatile compounds, temperature, humidity, pressure and light - the invisible variables that decide whether a room feels fresh or foggy. Others watch doors, people counts and environmental conditions across a whole site.
Above the hardware sits Empathic Building, the software Haltian acquired from TietoEVRY in 2020. It renders a building as an interactive floor plan: find a free desk, book a room, locate a colleague, report that the air is stale, and - for facility managers - see how space is actually used rather than how it was assumed to be used.
The customers are enterprises and the people who run their real estate. Named users include the energy company Uniper, which runs Empathic Building across offices including its Dusseldorf headquarters, plus Posti, the Lindstrom Group and TietoEVRY. In healthcare, Milton Keynes University Hospital has piloted Haltian's smart-hospital tools, tagging beds, wheelchairs and equipment so staff spend less time searching and more time on patients.
A digital twin for offices, hospitals and facilities - live occupancy, air data, wayfinding, desk and room booking, and workplace analytics.
Battery-powered wireless sensors on a mesh network with cellular gateways and a cloud platform, built for fast mass-scale deployment.
Wireless occupancy sensing for offices, hospitals and restaurants - the raw signal behind space-utilization data.
Indoor air-quality monitoring: CO2, TVOC, temperature, humidity, pressure and ambient light in one small device.
Haltian IoT Tracking Solution - scalable, low-cost asset tracking and real-time location for warehouses, logistics and healthcare.
Contract hardware engineering and mass production - the founding business behind devices such as the Oura ring.
Most smart-building projects stall at the same place: integration. A customer buys sensors from one vendor, a network from another, and dashboards from a third, then discovers the seams do not line up. Haltian's answer is to own the whole stack - device, network and software - so the building owner buys an outcome rather than a science project.
Two engineering choices follow from that. The first is battery life. A sensor that needs recharging or rewiring is a sensor that never gets deployed by the thousand; ten-year batteries are what turn a pilot into a rollout. The second is privacy: Haltian leans on presence and environmental sensing rather than cameras, which matters for offices and hospitals wary of surveillance and bound by GDPR.
The market pull is real. Building owners face tightening ESG and energy rules, and you cannot cut a building's footprint until you can measure it. That measurement layer - not any single dashboard - is what Haltian is selling, and it is what drove its steep growth.
Approximate reported revenue. 2021 growth was driven by the smart buildings and facilities segment. Figures are approximate.
Former Nokia product engineers launch Haltian as a hardware design and product-development house.
Haltian's engineering work contributes to standout devices including the Oura smart ring.
Launches its Thingsee IoT device solution and closes a $5M round led by Inventure.
Buys the digital twin service from TietoEVRY, completing its smart-building offering.
Revenue jumps from ~9M to ~15.5M euro, led by smart buildings and facilities.
Raises ~22M euro for expansion in Central Europe and North America; launches HITS asset tracking.
B2B. Haltian bundles sensor hardware, the mesh network and gateways, and the Empathic Building software into an end-to-end solution, usually on a subscription basis - recurring software and device-management revenue on top of hardware. It also still runs its original product-development and R&D engineering services.
Haltian sits at the crossroads of smart-building software (rivals such as Spacewell, Metrikus, VergeSense and Mapiq) and IoT sensing and real-time location (Disruptive Technologies, Density, Quuppa). Its distinction is full-stack ownership rather than any single layer.
Early round led by Inventure to scale the Thingsee IoT platform.
Growth round following 71% revenue growth in 2021.
Led by Mandatum Asset Management Growth Equity with Varma, Tesi, Ventic and Inventure - for expansion into Central Europe and North America.
Total funding to date: roughly 40M euro. Figures compiled from public reporting and are approximate.
It provides end-to-end IoT solutions for buildings - wireless Thingsee sensors plus the Empathic Building digital twin - to measure and act on occupancy, air quality and asset location in offices, hospitals, warehouses and logistics sites.
It was founded in 2012 in Oulu, Finland, by former Nokia product-development engineers, including CEO Pasi Leipala and CTO Jyrki Okkonen.
In its early years as a product-development and design house, Haltian's engineering work contributed to notable devices including the Oura smart ring.
Roughly 40M euro to date, including a ~22M euro round in April 2023 led by Mandatum Asset Management Growth Equity with Varma, Tesi, Ventic and Inventure.
Around 400 customers in 36 countries, including Uniper, Lindstrom Group, Posti, TietoEVRY and Milton Keynes University Hospital, across smart offices, hospitals and logistics.