Pila is one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2026

The Pila Mesh Home Battery has been named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2026.

We're very proud of that. A lot of people who have never considered a home battery read this list every year, and those are the people we started Pila for.

What TIME saw

TIME filed Pila under a four-word heading: "Power backup for renters." We'll take it.

Power outages are becoming more frequent and energy costs are rising. Most backup and energy optimization products are built for people who own a house, have a garage wall to hang a battery on, and can afford a whole-home system plus the electrician to install it. Those are excellent products, and some of our team helped build them. They also reach about 1% of US households today.

We built Pila for everyone else. Each one is about the size of a briefcase and plugs into a regular wall outlet. Put one next to the fridge and another under the desk with your router, and they find each other over a mesh network and work as one system. No rewiring. No red tape. No waiting.

When the power goes out, a single Pila keeps an average fridge cold for 32 to 64 hours, longer than most outages last. The rest of the year it works on your bill, charging when electricity is cheap and running your appliances from the battery when it's expensive.

TIME also noted that Pila won't run your central air. That's true. A battery big enough for every load in the house needs an electrician and costs far more, which puts it out of reach for most of the people we're trying to serve. We started with the fridge, the router, and the other things you can plug into an outlet.

Thank you

Thank you to TIME for the recognition, and to our team and our partners at Bould Design, who designed a battery you'd leave out in the living room. This is Pila's fourth award this year, after iF, Red Dot, and IDEA.

Most of all, thank you to our early customers, who bought a Pila when it was still a bet.

Read TIME's write-up on Pila
See the full Best Inventions of 2026 list