The engineer who ate a pizza in 45 seconds in Tokyo
and decided to rebuild the American kitchen from scratch.
Stanford EE. Solar car firmware. Google Glass. Oculus. Meta VR. Then - a wood-fired pizza oven in Japan, a question about outlet power, and a startup. Impulse Labs' Cooktop is the most powerful, precise stove ever made. It also secretly stabilizes the power grid.
It was a haptics conference. Sam D'Amico, then a product architect at Meta's AR/VR team building the Touch Pro controllers, ducked into a pizzeria called Savoy Pizza. The pie took forty-five seconds from raw dough to table. Wood-fired, brutally hot, done.
Back home in San Francisco, D'Amico kept thinking about that oven. His apartment had a standard 120-volt outlet. Nowhere near enough power. A 240-volt upgrade would need an electrician, a permit, probably weeks. The barrier wasn't culinary - it was electrical.
The answer, to an engineer who once wrote battery management firmware for a solar car that drove across Australia, was obvious in hindsight: put the battery inside the appliance. Store energy from the wall slowly. Release it fast when you cook. Same logic as a camera flash, just scaled up to kitchen-grade power.
D'Amico left Meta in summer 2021, founded Impulse Labs, and raised a $5 million seed round from Lux Capital, Construct Capital, and Lachy Groom before most people had heard the word. Fourteen months later: a $20 million Series A led by Josh Wolfe at Lux. Total: $25 million and a team of 74 people building something that had never existed before.
In January 2023, the gas stove debate exploded on social media. Politicians took sides. Cable news lost its mind. D'Amico posted a single tweet: "Gas stoves are the main character on twitter this week but a reminder that our entire playbook at Impulse Labs is that this should not be a culture war. Just ship obviously better stuff." That, in two sentences, is Sam D'Amico's operating philosophy.
He is not interested in telling anyone what to cook with or why they should care about the climate. He is interested in making the best possible stove. The climate argument follows if you do that right. It's the same logic that turned Tesla from niche to aspirational - lead with desire, not obligation.
The approach is unusual for a clean-energy founder. Most lean into mission and messaging. D'Amico leans into product. The Impulse Cooktop has passive magnetic knobs - no electrical connection to the knob itself - paired with a 12.8-inch touchscreen and precise temperature sensors that can hold sous-vide temperatures to within one degree Fahrenheit. It receives over-the-air software updates. It looks like something from a design studio, not a utility rebate catalog.
D'Amico thinks about the cooking performance conversation and the grid conversation as two completely separate problems that happen to share the same solution. The battery inside the cooktop exists to deliver 10 kilowatts per burner without requiring a panel upgrade. That same battery, connected to the grid, can participate in demand response programs - charging when electricity is cheap and renewable, discharging during peak demand. Aggregate that across thousands of homes, and D'Amico's vision becomes something significantly larger than a stove company.
"We basically want to combine all the batteries we deploy into essentially remake the power grid with us as the electron broker," he said in a 2023 interview. The math he points to: if Impulse places batteries in three major appliances per home, that represents 1.4 terawatt-hours of distributed storage deployment potential. For context, the entire US grid-scale battery storage capacity was roughly 26 gigawatt-hours in 2023.
The engineering path to that vision runs through a San Francisco factory, a supply chain that still relies heavily on Chinese manufacturing for Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, and a price point that currently sits at $5,999 - or about $4,200 after the 30% federal tax credit. D'Amico is clear-eyed about where he is in the journey: "I'm not Elon. We're not making a million stoves this year." What he is doing is building the manufacturing capacity, the compliance certifications, and the software infrastructure to eventually get there.
On tariffs and US manufacturing, D'Amico doesn't reach for nationalism. He reaches for economics: "Assembly in the United States is presently disincentivized." He cites a painted sheet metal adapter quoted at $750 domestically versus under $200 from China, and notes that LFP batteries simply are not manufactured at scale in the US. His approach is to design the business around existing supply chains and wait for economics to shift - "Don't panic and wait" - rather than paying a patriotism premium that would blow up his unit economics.
He also runs Indicator Fund, a small investment vehicle that suggests his interest in hardware and energy extends beyond his own company. For someone who has spent a career in consumer electronics - from the Stanford Solar Car Project to Google Glass to Oculus to Meta's Touch Pro - the curiosity is not surprising. D'Amico is the kind of engineer who finds the physics of knob design as interesting as the geopolitics of battery supply chains. His podcast appearances routinely run nearly two hours, covering fusion energy and suburban electrification and then doubling back to cooking temperatures.
The personal website, sdami.co, is two sentences and a list of links. No bio. No headshot. No mission statement. Just contact info and pointers to where the work is happening. That restraint, in a world of founder-brand inflation, says something about where his attention actually goes.
Standard gas stoves top out around 18,000 BTU, roughly 5 kW total. The Impulse delivers 10 kW per burner - drawing from a 3 kWh Lithium Iron Phosphate battery that charges slowly from the wall, then releases instantly when you need it. No panel upgrade. No electrician. Plug into 120V or 240V.
Active Temperature Sensing technology maintains exact cooking temperatures from 90°F to 450°F - covering delicate chocolate tempering, precise sous vide, and full sear. The knobs are passive magnetic with no electrical connection; the 12.8-inch display handles everything else.
The integrated battery participates in demand response programs - charging during off-peak hours when electricity is cheapest and cleanest, discharging during grid stress events. Aggregated across thousands of homes, this creates a distributed virtual power plant, with Impulse as the software layer coordinating it all.
"Gas stoves are the main character on twitter this week but a reminder that our entire playbook at Impulse Labs is that this should not be a culture war. Just ship obviously better stuff."
- Twitter / X, January 2023"We basically want to combine all the batteries we deploy into essentially remake the power grid with us as the electron broker."
- Founders in Arms Podcast"Integrating batteries not only unlocks really impressive performance improvements, it also removes a lot of common barriers around power or panel limitations."
- TechCrunch, Series A announcement"Assembly in the United States is presently disincentivized. Our attitude is: don't panic and wait."
- Heatmap News, supply chain interview"If we can intercept three major appliances per home... that's like 1.4 terawatt-hours of storage deployment potential."
- Heatmap News interview"I'm not Elon. We're not making a million stoves this year."
- Heatmap News, on manufacturing scaleAs a Stanford undergrad, D'Amico wrote the battery management firmware for a solar-powered car - then drove it across the Australian outback. That's where he first learned to think about energy storage as a performance tool, not just a safety feature.
The Impulse cooktop's physical knobs have no electrical connection whatsoever - they're passive magnetic controls. D'Amico is known to discuss knob design in near-obsessive detail. Getting the feel of a physical control right, on a fully digital appliance, took real engineering work.
His personal Substack newsletter is at derp.substack.com. No further explanation available. His personal site is two sentences. His Twitter is @sdamico. His Instagram is @srdamico. The man is not trying to build a personal brand.
Impulse Labs started as an electric pizza oven concept. D'Amico pivoted to induction cooking after identifying stronger market opportunities and policy tailwinds - including the Inflation Reduction Act's appliance rebate programs, which offer up to $840 toward the Impulse Cooktop.
The Impulse Cooktop uses Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) chemistry - the same type Tesla uses in base-model cars for longevity and safety. D'Amico freely admits this chemistry is exclusively manufactured at scale in China, and that designing around this supply chain reality is more honest than pretending otherwise.
If Impulse deploys batteries in three major appliances per home - stove, water heater, dryer - and scales to millions of households, the aggregate storage eclipses many utility-scale battery installations. That's what D'Amico means by "electron broker." It's not a metaphor. It's the product roadmap.
