Tallinn design house Krakul engineers the electronics, embedded software and firmware inside IoT devices and unmanned platforms, and has taken more than 100 products from concept to production.
Krakul was founded in 2013 by engineers who had worked on the ESTCube-1 satellite project, and employs a team of 16 in Tallinn. It works with companies in aerospace, defence, sustainable energy, consumer IoT, robotics and smart mobility, exporting mainly to the UK, Finland and Switzerland.
Hardware innovation is still a bottleneck
Software teams can put a working prototype in front of users in days. Hardware teams cannot. A concept has to pass through industrial design, electronics design, firmware, certification and a manufacturing partner willing to build it, and each of those steps has its own vocabulary and its own failure modes.
For startups and smaller firms the gap is widest between a demonstrable prototype and a product that can be manufactured, certified and supported. That is the point where projects stall or quietly die.
Design that starts with the person using the device
Krakul built its model around that gap. The company analyses the concept, engineers the product across embedded systems, electronics and firmware, supports certification and manufacturing, and stays involved until the product reaches end of life. Industrial design is treated as an engineering input rather than a cosmetic layer added at the end, which is what the company means by human-centric hardware.
That lifecycle involvement is what a smaller client cannot assemble internally: a partner that remains accountable after the prototype works and the difficult part begins.
Where the engineering goes
The company’s project list runs from consumer devices to defence equipment, and it is currently concentrating on electric vehicle charging technology. Earlier work includes a fault-detection device for wind-turbine lightning-protection systems developed with a Latvian partner — the kind of narrow, safety-relevant problem that rarely attracts attention and often decides whether a system can be insured and exported.
“Quoting one of our long-standing clients and a good friend: ‘Hardware is hard, man’. We are here to make it easier, taking the burden of hardware development, testing, verification and manufacturing upon our shoulders.”
Kristjan Tozen, CEO at Krakul
Estonia’s electronics sector includes both manufacturers and design houses, which lets a foreign company source engineering and production for the same device inside one country.
FACTS
Founded: 2013
Employees: 16
Location: Tallinn, Estonia
Services: embedded systems, electronics design, firmware and software development, certification and manufacturing support
Main export markets: UK, Finland, Switzerland
Award: Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2020
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