Impulse Labs Cooking with Electricity

Located at 1409 Minnesota Street, Impulse Labs launched last fall with an ambitious mission: to make it easier to electrify homes with better appliances.

The goal originated as part of Chief Executive Officer Sam D’Amico’s quest to build the perfect indoor pizza oven.

“I was fixated with making an insane pizza oven; one that could replicate the perfect brick oven,” said D’Amico. “You can’t get that power out of 220V outlet, but if you put batteries into the appliance, you can boost performance greatly…. Our first product is something that’s been in the climate zeitgeist for a while, and the sole reason many homes keep gas lines at all: the stove.”

Impulse is working to improve the performance of induction stoves, which rely on an electromagnetic field below a glass cooktop to heat cookware, enabling more precise temperature control. Induction stoves are less polluting than fossil gas – which produces nitrous dioxide and methane – with lower fire risks.

According to D’Amico, integrating a lithium iron phosphate battery pack into an induction stove delivers more immediate power, while lowering overall energy needs. Safer than traditional lithium-ion, this type of battery avoids peak demands on the grid by “trickle charging” an existing connection—such as a normal 120-volt outlet—so that power surges needed to quickly heat pans are provided by the battery. Even when peak load is high, average demand is low enough to fit within a normal 120V outlet, avoiding the need to add a 60 ampere panel connection.

A recent World Economic Forum study found that gas stoves emit methane even when not in use. More than 40 million U.S. homes—about one-third of residences—rely on gas stoves. In California, this number is closer to 70 percent.

A 2021 California Energy Commission building code update mandated that new homes and buildings constructed after 2023 must have panels and circuitry to support all-electric appliances and heating. Over the past four years 50 California cities and counties – including Berkeley and San Francisco – banned gas hookups in most new commercial and residential structures. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District recently prohibited the sale of natural gas heaters starting in 2030. 

Many Americans are resistant to electric stoves because of their poor performance and potential need for panel upgrades and wiring. The California Restaurant Association successfuly sued Berkeley in 2019 over its ban on gas hookups. 

“The gas industry has done a good job in building preference,” D’Amico said. 

Rather than promoting the negative argument that a gas stoves are polluting, however, D’Amico emphasizes the positive aspects associated with electrification, including innovation, power, and control.

“The tech has changed over the last 100 years, and there’s an opportunity to give people a fundamentally better product,” said D’Amico. “This is similar to how Tesla pitches fundamentally better cars. The battery enables us to exceed the performance of existing induction, and we have a few more plans to reinvent cooking that we’ll share more about later.”

Impulse Labs hopes its electric stove will lead the way for additional battery-integrated electric appliances that remove fossil fuels from homes. 

“Doing a stove first is a great backdoor way to deploy power to the grid,” he said. “You can provide a much better stove experience while also deploying 3+ kWh of batteries in every home when you do it; those batteries can then be used to offset other home usage and drive down peak loads on the grid in general.” 

While the company isn’t ready to reveal specifics on future products, it’s focusing on appliances that’re used for short durations at very high-power output.

Impulse Labs has garnered $25 million in funding from Lux Capital, Fifth Wall, Lachy Groom and Construct Capital, and grown to a team of 15 people with consumer hardware experience from companies like Oculus, Google and Peloton. D’Amico expects to add another 10 people in engineering and operations this year.

The company’s Dogpatch location—across the street from Harmonic Brewing, and fellow startup Nuro, a robotics company that develops self-driving vehicles— was a critical factor when it came to planting roots.

“We needed lab space so a warehouse made sense for us,” said D’Amico. “There’s a ton of awesome warehouse spaces in the Dogpatch, and we wouldn’t have gotten one as nice anywhere else in the City.”

With several team members residing in South Bay, being near a CalTrain station to minimize commute time was important. Employees come in three to four times a week to work together. D’Amico expects that Impulse Labs will gain more visibility—perhaps hosting community demonstrations—later this year as it continues developing products.