In this review paper introducing the special session “Electronic interfaces of heterogeneous miniature systems for smart autonomous sensors”, we discuss the recent progress in electrostatic (capacitive) kinetic energy harvesting. Electrostatic energy harvesters convert the kinetic energy of ambient motion to the electrical domain. While there are a number of other transduction mechanisms that can be employed to convert motion to electricity, capacitive harvesters are compatible with MEMS and CMOS technologies. In the future, they may facilitate fully integrated autonomous devices and, for this reason, we are focused on them in this paper. There are a number of requirements imposed on harvesting systems. These include improved reliability, a wide frequency band of operation, an effective max-to-min capacitance ratio, etc. In attempts to reach these requirements, there has been enormous progress in the area of capacitive energy harvesting in past years. We summarise recent achievements and discuss the state-of-the-art.