All electricity, everywhere, all the time; This is one of many climate mantras. Induction stoves take a lot of power, but – they can draw 40 amps at 240 volts. That’s the same as an indoor Level 2 EV charger. Not that many older homes aren’t wired to plug in a Tesla in your kitchen, which means upgrading to an induction range can be expensive. Induction to the rescue – the company’s ovens include a battery solution, which means it doesn’t draw a full 40 amps when working, and you can cook yourself with induction without having to upgrade your panel. Smart!
“I’ve been thinking about how to charge home appliances for a while, and the more I dug into the space, the more it became clear that there was a big story in aligning whole home electrification and energy storage with new policy winds and distributed energy incentives,” said Impulse CEO Sam D’Amico. “Integrating batteries not only unlocks dramatic performance improvements, but also removes many of the common barriers around power or panel limitations, installing induction stoves and adding energy storage to the grid.”
The company announced today that it has officially launched and raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Lux Capital and joined by Fifth Wall, Lachie Groome and Construction Capital. This brings their total funding to $25 million (Lux Capital, Construct and Lachy Groom previously led the company’s $5 million seed round in 2021).
“There’s an undeniable momentum toward electrification of everything,” commented Josh Wolff, co-founder and managing partner of Lux Capital. “What Impulse is building is not only meaningful, but morally imperative, changing the architecture of our daily lives by reducing our dependence on natural gas and carbon,” he told TechCrunch in an email. We are proud to support the Impulse team and help bring their vision to life.
Initially, the company planned to use batteries to create the perfect electric pizza oven, but when the company researched the market, it realized that there were more opportunities. As the company puts it: What started as a cool idea to make pizza became a mission to reinvent the home appliance industry.
Impulse recognized early on that there was an opportunity to launch compelling products to take advantage of all the wonderful tailwinds from the electric vehicle and renewable spaces (including the policy tailwinds of the Inflation Act). The company explains that induction cooking has a pretty long history, and has outlined some basic ways to cook using induction technology.
Impulse’s futuristic-looking range of induction cooktops could bring some exciting new features to a kitchen near you. Image Credits: Pressure.
“We know that building a hardware business is difficult, especially given the current economic climate. We sincerely believe this. [round of financing] It will make us the major checkpoints needed to ship our first hardware product, at the point where we receive orders from customers,” says D’Amico. “This paves the way for us to begin pre-orders next year with a reliable and realistic delivery date that does not match expectations for high-end furniture.”
The company is positioning itself squarely in the challenge around residential and light industrial carbonation.
“This pushes us in a fundamental direction – stopping the use of fossil fuels at the ‘edge’ means we have to electrify everything,” D’Amico said of the vision. “Moving storage to the edge instead of fossil fuels allows us to do this without relying on drastic changes to the built environment and without having to significantly expand our power distribution infrastructure to handle new high pressures.”
The biggest draw from the Impulse is that the battery price is going down, but the functionality is Loading Batteries continue to be trivial in the built environment. Many kitchens, however, have 220V connections, and that’s where Impulse sees an opportunity.
“Our main realization is that the places where we install appliances are already wired for electricity and often for 220V connections in new homes,” D’Amico commented. “At the very least, this means we can electrify existing gas facilities, and moving forward to new properties means that the storage can be used for domestic use as well.”
