The Warming Surfaces Company: Reimagining heating by creating pockets of warmth

By Ndéla Faye | Photos: The Warming Surfaces Company

The Warming Surfaces Company brings heating to the age of sustainability with its Halia® digital warming technology, which turns surfaces in our living spaces into smart warming surfaces. The company’s ambition is to redefine heating as a distributed, material property of built environments rather than a central utility system.

As Europe accelerates its transition toward electrification and decarbonisation, sustainability and energy costs are taking on new urgency. Finnish start-up The Warming Surfaces Company believes that the answer is not to heat air more efficiently, but to rethink where heat lives.

At the centre of that vision is Halia warming, a new kind of digital heating technology that turns everyday surfaces into intelligent sources of warmth. Rather than relying on conventional convection heating systems that warm entire rooms, Halia warming focuses on what the company calls pockets of warmth: targeted, localised heat delivered directly where people are sitting or interacting.

The Warming Surfaces Company: Reimagining heating by creating pockets of warmth

Warming designed for comfort, built for efficiency

The Warming Surfaces Company was founded in 2022 by a team with over 75 years of combined experience in in translating research-based technologies into commercial solutions. According to co-founder and CEO Jani-Mikael Kuusisto, the initial innovation did not begin with a single application in mind. Instead, it was the potential of the underlying novel means to embed heating inside of surface materials, followed by a search for meaningful use cases with maximum societal impact.

At its core, Halia rethinks the relationship between people, objects, and temperature. The technology can be integrated into interior and exterior surfaces such as tables, walls, floors and furniture, creating controllable heat zones within existing environments.

“Just as LEDs shifted illumination from bulky and resource-intensive systems to small, energy-efficient solutions embedded in everyday objects, Halia warming seeks to bring that same approach to heating, moving away from room-level systems toward intelligent surfaces,” Kuusisto says.

The principle is simple, but its implications are broad, especially in buildings where energy efficiency is becoming both an environmental and economic necessity.

Warming tabletops on a Stromma Group sightseeing boat in Copenhagen.

First uses in outdoor applications

One of the first commercial applications for Halia warming is the Quatro warming terrace table, developed as a demonstration of how the technology performs in real-world environments. According to the company, the system uses less than five per cent of the energy of conventional terrace heaters.

“We didn’t expect to begin from outdoor applications, but then France – a nation where 1/3 of meals are served outdoors – banned terrace heating. Emissions were equal to around 300,000 cars in traffic. We saw an opportunity to keep people warm, without those emissions,” the CEO explains. “With our technology, we can bring emission-free, energy-efficient warmth back into terraces, in France and elsewhere.”

The Warming Surfaces Company: Reimagining heating by creating pockets of warmth

The Quatro tables also incorporate motion and presence sensing. Sensors detect when someone is seated, activating heat only when needed and switching off automatically when the space is empty. This, the company says, reduces unnecessary energy consumption while maintaining comfort.

“The technology creates pockets of warmth that heat up the large muscles in the body. You can control the temperature, and thanks to the sensors, it only activates when someone is actually sitting at the table and turns off when they leave,” says Kuusisto.

The approach reframes heating not as a constant background condition, but as an on-demand experience tied to human presence.

The Warming Surfaces Company: Reimagining heating by creating pockets of warmth

Halia® heating elements embedded inside surface materials allow effective creation and direction of heat where it is needed.

Energy efficient warming on land and on water

Halia’s first deployments are already proving their value in real-world settings both on land and on water. After initial use in the hospitality sector, the company’s warming tabletops have been installed in a Stromma Group sightseeing boat in Copenhagen, where the shift toward electrification has introduced new challenges for onboard heating systems.

As Kuusisto explains, Halia warming delivers localised radiant heat directly at seating areas, reducing system-wide load while maintaining passenger comfort. The tables automatically activate only when in use, helping to extend the operational season of boats without significantly increasing energy consumption.

Mads Vestergaard Olesen, CEO of Stromma Danmark, highlights the impact: “Danish weather can be unpredictable, but Halia’s new technology allows guests to enjoy outdoor seating even in early spring and late summer. As we move toward electrifying our fleet, solutions like this are essential. They deliver comfort without increasing energy consumption to a level that would compromise vessel range, all while remaining emission-free.”

The Warming Surfaces Company: Reimagining heating by creating pockets of warmth

Ultimately a response to energy poverty and inefficient buildings

Beyond hospitality and sustainable tourism, the urgency behind such innovation is very real: across the European Union, an estimated 43 million people experience energy poverty, meaning they cannot maintain adequate indoor temperatures. At the same time, a large share of Europe’s building stock remains energy inefficient and is in need of renovation.

In most homes and commercial spaces, heating represents the single largest energy expense. Halia positions itself directly within this challenge, offering an alternative model: rather than heating entire volumes of air – most of which goes to waste – energy is directed toward surfaces and people near them.

The Warming Surfaces Company: Reimagining heating by creating pockets of warmth

Kuusisto draws a simple comparison to heated car seats. The concept of warm surfaces is familiar, but Halia warming technology expands it from isolated features into architectural systems, materials and items that can be embedded into interior and product design itself.

The company also highlights historical precedents for this way of thinking. From Persian korsi tables to Japanese kotatsu and Spanish mesa camilla traditions, cultures around the world have long created warm zones within colder environments by heating objects rather than entire rooms.

These systems were not only practical, but social: they were centres of communal life, rest and shared warmth. The name Halia, derived from the Finnish word for hug, reflects this dual meaning of thermal and human closeness.

The Warming Surfaces Company: Reimagining heating by creating pockets of warmth A new model for heating

Halia warming surfaces are designed to be lightweight, recyclable, and material-efficient, with the company claiming up to 95 per cent material reduction compared to conventional heating systems. According to Kuusisto, in the terrace tables, the combination of reduced material use, targeted energy delivery and demand-based activation results in a payback period of under a year in energy consumption terms.

The Warming Surfaces Company’s vision is to provide warmth sustainably – for the environment, as much as for businesses and people. “Our mission is to help improve the lives and health of people and our planet through more efficient warming solutions, and become a household name in the world of heating,” says Kuusisto.

More broadly, the company frames its mission as a shift in how comfort itself is produced: moving away from energy-intensive systems toward localised, human-centred thermal design. In doing so, Halia challenges a long-held assumption – that warmth is something we generate for entire spaces – by proposing instead that it can be designed more precisely, around people.

The Warming Surfaces Company: Reimagining heating by creating pockets of warmth