Many technology companies arrive at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, the world’s biggest tech show. They often make bold claims about the life-changing potential of their innovations, but it’s rare to see anything that actually lives up to the hype.
When you do see something truly special, on the other hand, it can seem like magic. That’s exactly how I felt when I experienced the wireless charging demo from Finnish company Willo, a deep-tech startup that’s just emerged from stealth mode.
«Seeing is believing,» Willo co-founder and President Marko Voutilainen tells me as I take a seat in a Las Vegas hotel suite to witness what the company hopes will be a revolution in wireless power. It could render the charging cables that rule our lives and clog up our drawers obsolete for good.
Wireless power has long posed a conundrum to tech companies. There needs to be perfect alignment between a device and the charger, which means that it’s often just as convenient to simply plug a cable into your phone. Wireless charging today feels like a half-baked solution.
The tech that Willo showed me doesn’t rely on charging pads, line of sight, directional targeting or even immediate proximity. Instead, it allows devices to be charged simply by existing within the force field of the power source.
The demo I’m being shown looks unassuming. They tell me I shouldn’t get caught up too much with the form factor of the power source — a simple gray-white cube. This isn’t a consumer device that’s for sale, merely a means to demonstrate the technology to me.
Willo CEO Hari Santamala picks up several receivers, black boxes shaped like phones with LEDs on the top. As he moves them to within 15 inches or so of the power source, the LEDs light up. He moves them around the cube, rotating them in different directions. The LEDs remain lit.
I’m seeing. I’m believing.
Making power cables the floppy disks of tomorrow
Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to take any pictures or videos. This week at CES, Willo is emerging from stealth mode to show the world what it can do, but it’s still playing its cards close to its chest.
The core technology is based on more than a decade of research by the company co-founder and CTO Nam Ha-Van. The company is claiming a number of world firsts with its wireless power tech, including the ability to rotate devices at any angle while charging, along with the ability to charge multiple devices at once.
Santamala talks me through his vision for how it would exist in the home. «You have to build the transmitter in a way that it’s kind of a natural part of your environment,» he says. «Ideally, we don’t see any of this,» he adds, gesturing to the cube.
You could sit on the sofa with your phone in your pocket, and it would be quietly charging while you watch TV. If you were working from home, you could move freely around your house with your laptop, never having to worry about plugging it in.
«We want to do to power cables, what floppy disks are to us today,» Voutilainen says. «They’re remnants of the past.»
It feels like the thing we’ve been waiting for — the way wireless charging was always supposed to be. So when can we expect to get it?
Willo is here at CES meeting journalists like me, but also the kind of partners it will need to adopt this technology and take it out into the world. Voutilainen and Santamala are cagey about their ideal strategy for doing this, but it feels like they’re hinting towards something open and large-scale. Comparisons to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are thrown around.
«This can really change our everyday lives if introduced correctly in a very kind of open and driving-the-market-forward kind of way,» Santamala says. The company’s tech is «pretty ready» for industrialization, he adds — it just depends on their partners’ use cases and timelines.
I depart from the demo suite, hoping that what I’ve seen is as viable as I’ve been led to believe. Willo clearly thinks it has something special on its hands, and if the rest of the tech industry agrees, this might just be the first step toward a future free of charging cable fuss and inconvenience.
