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Impulse Launches with $20M Series A

by Impulse Labs | November 15, 2023

We’re excited to announce the official launch of Impulse and our $20M Series A funding round led by Josh Wolfe at Lux Capital, and joined by Fifth Wall, Lachy Groom, and Construct Capital. This brings our total funding to $25M (Lux Capital, Construct, and Lachy Groom formerly led our $5M seed round in 2021). It’s an honor to reach this milestone with the support of incredible investors who believe in our mission to accelerate electrification in the home, a mission we can’t wait to bring to life. We’re building next-generation battery-integrated electric appliances that will help people remove fossil fuels from their homes, while delivering a premium experience with top performance. Making choices that benefit your home and the environment can be frustrating and confusing - we want to change that starting with our first product: a battery-integrated induction stove with (almost) unbelievable power, efficiency and precision. 

The initial catalyst behind Impulse was an idea to use batteries to build the perfect indoor pizza oven. Over time as I continued to discuss the concept with friends and considered the space more deeply, it became clear there was a much bigger story. Adding batteries to appliances not only unlocks performance abilities, but also creates opportunities for energy storage in alignment with home electrification, emerging policy tailwinds, and distributed energy resource incentives. What started as a cool idea to make pizza - became a mission to reframe the home appliance industry.

Over the past twenty-years, home appliances have seen little to no game-changing innovation and are still largely powered by gas - a nonrenewable energy source that, when burned, we know harms the environment and isn’t great for people. When you cook with gas, toxins from combustion (the act of igniting the gas from your stove into a flame) are released directly into your home. These fumes include toxins such as nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde, which are known lung irritants that are linked to respiratory conditions and asthma in children. Additionally, another study shows that many gas stoves release methane even when turned off. Even if we disregard carbon dioxide, the pollution impacts of gas appliances add up to significant increases in outdoor air pollution and greenhouse gasses.

While awareness around the dangers and environmental impact of using gas in the home is on the rise, roughly one third of American homes utilize a gas stove. Commercial and residential building energy use is responsible for about 13% of carbon emissions, with gas appliances as the biggest offenders. When asked about switching from gas stoves to electric options such as induction, people usually sympathize with the environmental and health benefits, but they’re often torn over frustrations with performance and bad prior experiences such as: scorched pots, uneven heating, confusing controls, expensive panel upgrades, wiring nightmares, the list goes on. Frankly, they’re not wrong. Switching to an electric option is often painful and even if you do, the experience isn’t great - we plan to change this.

With our induction stove we’re able to significantly uplevel performance, making everyday tasks like boiling water up to ten times faster than gas equivalents. Performance innovation is driving the transition to electric vehicles — they are now fundamentally better cars. We intend to replicate this story for the most stubborn fossil fuel use cases in the home. The industry has missed the mark on delivering viable and attractive alternatives to gas powered appliances that customers are happy to use and not intimidated to install. At Impulse, we’re creating solutions with integrated batteries that combine stored and grid energy so you can go electric, add energy storage to your home without upgrading your panel, and get premium, high performance appliances you’ll actually want in your home. Our products will help drive home electrification and make it easier, simpler, and more beneficial for residential and commercial owners to make the switch from gas to electric power.

We’re a team of engineers, designers and innovators based in San Francisco dedicated to building delightful, high-performance products for everyday needs that enable rewarding, long-term, scalable solutions for whole-home electrification. Our team is made up of folks with extensive experience shipping successful consumer hardware products at industry leading companies such as Oculus, Google and Peloton.

We’re growing (yes, we’re hiring), we’re building, and we’re excited to show you what we’re working on. Subscribe for early access or reach out to us at info@impulselabs.com.

IL
Impulse Labs