Cerloq is an Amsterdam-based hardware company. We make smart property gateways for short-term rental hosts and property managers. We don't make them for general smart-home consumers, and that constraint is what makes the product good.
In 2025, the founder spent a summer managing three short-term rental apartments in Athens. Every existing solution was retrofitted from somewhere else.
Sensibo was a smart AC controller for general homes that didn't know what a booking was. Minut was a noise sensor that didn't know whether the property was rented or empty. Smart locks didn't talk to AC controllers. Booking platforms didn't talk to anything.
The result: four devices on every wall, four apps on every phone, four subscription bills, and not one of them understood that an empty rental with the AC blasting is the single biggest cost a host can actually control.
The math was obvious. Mediterranean STRs run AC for six months a year at €0.30+/kWh, and peer-reviewed field studies report 17–30% HVAC reduction when control is occupancy-aware. A device that switches off the AC when the room is genuinely empty saves on the order of up to €100/month in peak summer per unit. A device armed by the owner, not a schedule, eliminates false alerts. A device that measures the runtime it avoided — and under-claims by design — gives you savings you can actually trust.
None of this is technically hard. It just hadn't been built yet, because the existing players grew up serving general smart-home customers, not STR property managers. They saw STR as an edge case. We see it as the entire product.
Cerloq One is what we built. Hardware engineered for hospitality. Software designed around how rentals are actually used. A subscription model that pays for what costs us money and free-tiers everything else. EU-based, GDPR-native, no VC growth pressure to compromise the product.
A device built for one customer segment with one workflow will always beat a device built for everyone. We chose STR property managers and accept that we'll never be the default smart-home product.
No camera. No audio recordings sent to the cloud. mmWave radar instead of imaging. Per-device certificates. EU-only data. We design the privacy first, then the features.
Standard MQTT, standard SQL, standard HTTP. If we ever stopped operating, customers could migrate elsewhere. We earn renewals by continuing to be the best option, not by trapping you.
The ROI dashboard shows ranges, not point estimates. "You saved €80–120 this month" is honest. A flat per-stay number to the cent is precision theatre that breaks trust the first time it disagrees with your bill. See the peer-reviewed evidence base.
We focus on Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Croatia. Hot summers, dense STR markets, real ROI. We'll expand when the product is great here, not when investors want a slide on global TAM.
Bootstrapped. Founder-led. Slow growth. Profitable by year 3. We'd rather build a long-term hardware company than chase a venture-scale outcome that pressures us into product decisions our customers don't want.
We're intentionally small. Hardware companies fail when they grow faster than they understand their customers. As of 2026, the team is one founder and a network of contractors, with first hires scheduled post-seed.
Founder · Embedded engineering
Embedded software engineer with deep ESP-IDF and FreeRTOS background. Greek by origin, based in Amsterdam since 2020. Spent the summer of 2025 managing STR apartments in Athens, which is when the product idea crystallized.
Open · Backend + go-to-market
We're looking for a commercial co-founder with proptech, hospitality tech, or B2B SaaS sales background. Existing relationships with property managers preferred. Read more on careers.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Registered as Cerloq B.V. — a Dutch private limited company. WBSO-registered for R&D tax credits.
Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Croatia, southern France
Mediterranean STR markets where AC runs 6+ months a year and energy savings are most material.
We're hiring a backend co-founder. Contact us if you have proptech or B2B SaaS experience and want to build a hardware company that's in it for the long term.
See open roles