Plug it in. The two most frustrating words in robotics. Every autonomous system, every warehouse robot, every drone fleet eventually hits the same wall: the battery runs out, and someone has to physically connect a cable. Willo wants to make those words irrelevant.

The Helsinki-based deeptech startup has raised EUR 2.9 million in pre-seed funding to develop wireless power technology that charges devices over the air without alignment, without cables, and without the device needing to sit still. Your phone's wireless charging pad requires precise placement. Willo's system doesn't care if the device is moving, rotating, or facing the wrong direction.

The round was led by byFounders, with Interface Capital, Unruly Capital, and Wave Ventures joining. The angel list reads like a Nordic tech all-star roster: Andreas Klinger (ex-Product Hunt CTO), Niccolo Perra (Pleo co-founder), Vincent Ho-Tin-Hoe (Wolt CPO), Urho Konttori (Varjo CEO), and Sune Alstrup (Eye Tribe founder).

Willo emerged from stealth at CES 2026 in January and immediately won CNET's Best of CES 2026 award. The demo showed power being delivered to devices over the air, through open space, while those devices moved around. CES attendees are notoriously easy to impress. CNET's editorial team is not.

The technology draws on more than a decade of wireless power research led by Dr. Nam Ha-Van, who relocated from Japan to Finland to commercialize the work. The founding team includes Harri Santamala and Marko Voutilainen, with collective experience at Microsoft, Nokia, and Oura. That pedigree matters because Willo isn't just solving a physics problem. It's building hardware that needs to survive real-world industrial environments.

Winning an award is step one. Building a product that customers can evaluate and integrate is step two. That's where the EUR 2.9 million goes.

Santamala's framing is precise and worth repeating: "Wireless power is one of the last unsolved infrastructure layers in autonomy." Every other component of autonomous systems has improved dramatically. Sensors got cheaper. Compute got faster. AI models got more capable. But the power problem remained stubbornly physical.

Think about a warehouse robot. It navigates aisles, picks items, and organizes shelves autonomously. Then it drives itself to a charging dock, physically aligns with a connector, and sits there for hours. That downtime and the infrastructure required to manage charging schedules is one of the largest hidden costs in robotic deployments.

Now imagine a ceiling-mounted system that continuously delivers power to every robot on the floor while they work. No docking. No scheduling. No alignment. The robots never stop. That's the vision Willo is chasing, and it's the reason the angel investors on this round include people who build robots (Varjo's AR/VR headsets need continuous power), run logistics platforms (Wolt), and think about spatial computing (Klinger).

Deep tech startups live or die on their team's ability to bridge the gap between research and engineering. Willo's founding team is structured for exactly that bridge. Ha-Van brings the physics. Santamala brings the hardware commercialization experience from Nokia and Microsoft. Voutilainen brings the wearable electronics background from Oura, where miniaturization and power efficiency are existential concerns.

They've also recruited postdoctoral researchers who relocated from Japan and the United States to Helsinki. In a world where talent acquisition is the hardest part of building a deep tech company, convincing researchers to move continents is evidence of something compelling happening in the lab.

Magnus Hambleton, Partner at byFounders, said the team is "pairing deep technical work with universally applicable hardware execution that very few teams in Europe can pull off." That's a high bar. Europe has produced plenty of deep tech companies with brilliant research and no commercial traction. Willo's next twelve months will determine which category it falls into.

The funding will take Willo from breakthrough demonstration to an early reference system that partners can evaluate. In practical terms, that means building something that a robotics company or industrial automation firm can install in a test environment and measure against their existing charging infrastructure.

The metrics that matter aren't technical. They're economic. Can Willo's system deliver power efficiently enough that the total cost of ownership is lower than docking stations? Can it handle the interference, obstacles, and environmental noise of a real factory floor? Can it scale to cover an entire facility rather than a single demo room?

If the answer to those questions is yes, the market size is staggering. Every autonomous vehicle, every industrial robot, every warehouse logistics system, every drone fleet represents a potential deployment. If the answer is 'not yet,' the company has enough runway and enough credibility from CES to keep iterating.

Either way, the cable has been the last physical tether keeping autonomous systems from true autonomy. Willo is trying to cut it.