Where the idea came from.
CoolCove began with a complaint. Our founder, Mara Velasco, had moved into a fourth-floor walk-up in Crown Heights with a single window air conditioner that was older than she was. It was loud enough to drown out phone calls, ugly enough that she kept a bedsheet draped over it, and so heavy that dragging it between rooms felt like moving furniture. Like millions of Americans, she rented — meaning drilling through a wall or installing a mini-split simply wasn't an option. So she bought a portable air conditioner instead, and discovered the second problem: it was louder than the window unit, leaked condensation onto the hardwood, and made the room feel like a walk-in freezer on one side and a sauna on the other.
That frustration turned into a sketch on a napkin. By the end of 2019, Mara had recruited two former HVAC engineers and an industrial designer, and CoolCove was incorporated in Delaware with a small seed round from a Brooklyn-based climate fund. The first eighteen months were spent almost entirely on research: 312 interviews in twelve cities, dozens of focus groups, and a partnership with a thermal-comfort lab at a public university in upstate New York. What we learned reshaped our product roadmap entirely.
What we believe.
Three convictions run through every decision we make. First, climate comfort is not a luxury — it is a basic component of a livable home, and the people who are most often denied it (renters, students, low-income households) are precisely the ones the industry has under-served. Second, a portable appliance should not feel like a compromise. The unit you wheel from room to room should be as quiet, as efficient, and as beautiful as anything else in your home. Third, sustainability is non-negotiable: every CoolCove unit is built to be repaired, not replaced, and we publish a full parts catalog so that a five-year-old compressor is not an obituary for the device.
How we work.
We are a deliberately small team. Eleven people in Brooklyn, three field engineers who travel for installation research, and a network of independent repair technicians across forty states. We prototype in our own shop, we test in real apartments (never just labs), and we ship software updates over the air the moment a bug is fixed — sometimes within hours, never within months. We do not advertise on social media, we do not run influencer campaigns, and we do not chase the algorithm. Most of our customers find us through a friend, a neighbor, or a Reddit thread. That, more than any marketing metric, is the bar we measure ourselves against.
Today CoolCove is shipped to every U.S. state and nine countries in Europe and East Asia. The team has grown, but the question we ask before we ship anything is the same one we asked in 2019: would Mara still put this in her own bedroom?