Martin Srna

Product @impulselabs

[Sam D'Amico @sdamico]

Wirecutter review of @ImpulseLabs just dropped.

[Nan Ransohoff @nanransohoff]

Today we're launching Intercept: a $500M philanthropic initiative to make respiratory infections, like the common cold and flu, a thing of the past.

We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case. Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses, they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics.

So, if they’re such a big problem, why haven’t we dealt with them yet? Last year we convened ~40 leading scientists, pharma R&D leaders, biotech investors, and regulatory experts to better understand that.

We heard two main reasons:
(1) First, it’s just technically very challenging: respiratory viruses represent hundreds of distinct, mutating strains across several families. Fortunately, recent breakthroughs make this newly possible.
(2) Second is a lack of funding: broad-spectrum solutions have historically been underfunded, in part because they’re not a great fit for most philanthropic or commercial funding (and while COVID generated a burst of activity around preventing and understanding respiratory infections through an influx of new funding, that hasn't been sustained).

We think that with enough focus and funding, this might be solvable. Intercept is a $500 million philanthropic initiative that will take advantage of new tools to catalyze the development and deployment of two types of products: broad-spectrum preventatives and air cleaning technologies.

This problem is undoubtedly difficult. But it’s more tractable now than it’s ever been. We think we should give it our best shot.

We’re enormously grateful to our anchor funders: @stripe, @AnthropicAI, @TheFluLab, @FoundationOAI and individuals from Jane Street.

And, I’m very excited to be building this with @incredutility and the rest of the team.

[Martin Srna @MartinSrna]

@yishan @ImpulseLabs Great to see!

[Martin Srna @MartinSrna]

So grateful for @minney_cat and the whole @lighthousehq_ team

[Minn @minney_cat]

In the age of AI, human ingenuity becomes even more valuable. The likes of @elonmusk @spacex, @nvidia, @anthropic, @OpenAI were founded in the U.S. for a reason.

Over the years, I've met thousands of talented founders, engineers, and technologists, and many left everything familiar for the chance to build something new.

So we sat down to hear their stories.

First Landing 👇

[Minn @minney_cat]

In the age of AI, human ingenuity becomes even more valuable. The likes of @elonmusk @spacex, @nvidia, @anthropic, @OpenAI were founded in the U.S. for a reason.

Over the years, I've met thousands of talented founders, engineers, and technologists, and many left everything familiar for the chance to build something new.

So we sat down to hear their stories.

First Landing 👇

[David Hansen 🇺🇸 🇳🇿 @boxcardavid]

Westmag is building American robot actuators and drone motors at scale.

In 2025, @westmagco raised $11M led by @a16z, with participation from @FoundersFund, @LuxCapital, NFDG, @MenloVentures, and other top investors.

Since then, we’ve been building industrial capacity, crawling up supply chains, and securing high-volume customers.

Now, we’re ramping production at our factory in South San Francisco to deliver against committed offtake orders from high-volume customers.

Westmag is committed to scaling quickly in the US to deliver millions of drone motors and robot actuators to the surging domestic and global market.

We’re building the great American motor and actuator company.

[Zane Mountcastle @zanemountcastle]

1/ I'm excited to announce that @Picogrid closed a $45M Series A, led by @BessemerVP.

We're building the open infrastructure layer for the military's growing arsenal of sensors, drones, autonomous systems, AI agents, and C2 software.

[Zane Mountcastle @zanemountcastle]

Good morning, New York!

[Martin Srna @MartinSrna]

Congrats @maddiehalla & team!

[Maddie Hall @maddiehalla]

1/ @OctopusEnergy is backing Living Carbon with $500M to reforest degraded land and remove CO₂ across North America. This major project financing comes with an additional ~$13M investment in our carbon business.

Living Carbon is putting low quality land back to work. Our innovative reforestation turns low quality land into thriving forests faster to remove carbon or produce sustainable forest products.

Read more about it in today’s @WSJ (link in the comments) →

[Martin Srna @MartinSrna]

Excited to announce our latest partnership! This is a major step for us as we launch a new partner product line powered by Impulse, expand into Europe, and begin local production in Italy 🇮🇹

[Sam D'Amico @sdamico]

Ok - here goes. We're Italymaxxing 🇮🇹.

We're parting with B.S. Service Group to bring @ImpulseLabs to Europe with local manufacturing in Fabriano, Italy.

They're our third Impulse Core partner, joining @THORKitchen and @DiscoverZephyr

1/

[Lyn Stoler @stolerlyn]

> installed @ImpulseLabs in my kitchen last week
> left an out-of-town friend to fend for himself, alone, at my house
> get this text in the middle of the day

[Maddie Hall @maddiehalla]

1/Big week for the @living_carbon team.

Landing a Fortune 100 hyperscaler as a customer is a big deal.

Landing two (@Meta and @Google) in the same week is even bigger.

And adding @McKinsey as a customer on top of that is pretty incredible.

[Wally Nowinski @Nowooski]

If you’re curious, here’s a boil off showing how the Impulse Cooktop compares to standard induction with power boost.

[Martin Srna @MartinSrna]

@Nowooski https://t.co/2sCpU2fdVc

[travis kalanick @travisk]

Atoms.

https://t.co/nbCnIkI3RD

[Sam D'Amico @sdamico]

doing the opposite of “enshittification” every day @ImpulseLabs

[Sam D'Amico @sdamico]

the best part is that their house already has a stove

[Impulse @ImpulseLabs]

The most common feedback we get: "Love the product, need a different form factor." So we turned our technology into a platform called Impulse Core to get it into more form factors faster. 🧵

[Andrew Jeffery @credealjunkie]

Imagine you rented a nice little 1-bed in Nob Hill in 2023 for $2,400 just before word got out San Francisco was no longer a shithole.

Nice.

Now, because of rent control every year your landlord is allowed to raise rents around 2%, and you can stay in that apartment for as long as you want.

Meanwhile AI blah blah blah and three years later the apartment next door just rented for $3,800 and you’re paying $2,550.

Because, rent control.

You want a bigger place but you don’t want it that much, so you delay moving.

Just like the other 40,000 people who moved into new apartments in SF that year when once again the world started moving to SF to strike it rich.

Supply drops at the same time as demand is increasing.

So when people do move out of their rent control SF apartments, (life happens), open houses get flooded, bidding wars break out, because in all of Nob Hill you have maybe one or two decent apartments for rent at any given time.

Thank you, rent control?

And this is why in cities with rent control, rents go absolutely bananas which leads to crazy headlines and politicos seizing the opportunity to push for - you guessed it - more rent control.

Because they can’t seem to understand this simple story.

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Omelettes made on my @ImpulseLabs_ “SamStove” come out perfectly every time.

Easily the best kitchen upgrade in the last decade. Future generations won’t believe our ancestors stoves controlled heat rate not temperature.