Matthew Knoll
CO-FOUNDER AND CTO OF QUILT
SMART HOME CLIMATE STARTUP QUILT is betting that a smarter heat pump can do for home HVAC what Apple did for mobile tech: simplify, streamline, and redefine the experience. The company’s all-electric, ductless system offers room-by-room temperature control, occupancy-based energy savings, a design-forward interface, and—perhaps most importantly—emissions-cutting potential.
“Most of the emissions in your life actually come from two places,” said Matthew Knoll, co-founder and CTO of Quilt. “One of them is your car and the other one heating and cooling your home. And emissions from your home are actually more than your car.” That makes decarbonizing residential heating a powerful lever for climate action and one Knoll is well-equipped to pull.
A former Google X engineer, Knoll has spent his career launching first-generation technologies, from humanoid robots in Boston to stratospheric internet balloons. “I think I was able to meet Steve Wozniak at one of those FIRST [For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology] Robotics events,” he said, recalling his early passion for engineering in high school. “I just really loved the idea of building things and innovating.”
“For me, it’s really clear that there’s not a better place to be putting my skillset.”
—Matthew Knoll
If Knoll could sit down to dinner with any engineer from history, he’d choose the Wright brothers. “I read a good autobiography of them,” he said. “I thought they were really great engineers and kind of entrepreneurial.” No doubt Knoll identifies with their blend of hands-on ingenuity and vision for the future.
Quilt’s core product is a ductless mini-split heat pump system. “What it allows you to do is heat and cool each room in your home independently, which is not possible with existing gas furnaces,” Knoll explained. “We’ve built one of the most efficient systems on the market, the most efficient two-zone heat pump out there, just with a lot of good engineering and optimization.”
The system uses state-of-the-art radar for room-by-room occupancy sensing. “You’re trying to sense people in a room even when they might be asleep,” Knoll said. “Getting all the sensors to work really reliably is quite challenging from an engineering point of view.”
Bringing Quilt to market wasn’t Knoll’s first time working from “zero to one.” At Google, he led early-phase projects that required him to build teams from scratch and convince people to work on new ideas. Most recently, he was an engineering leader at Tidal, the Google [X] moonshot using robotics and AI to monitor ocean ecosystems.
At Quilt, that experience has translated into a team of engineers largely drawn from Nest and Google: “People who’ve worked on some of the smartest software and also built products in a similar space,” he added.
“We’re building products that replace furnaces and homes with something that’s fully electric and really great for the environment,” he said. “Homes last hundreds of years. So, once we’ve removed that furnace, there’ll never be another furnace in that home.”
Quilt is actively hiring mechanical engineers to help scale next-generation climate solutions. Learn more at quilt.com/careers.
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