These heat pumps can be installed in an hour—and will cut costs in half
5 days ago
Focus
Energy, Intelligence
Stage
Seed
Why we invested
Today’s heat pumps are a great idea wrapped in a terrible user experience. It is unquestionably the best way to move heat in and out of a building, and is the cleanest and cheapest way to comfort a home over its lifetime. People want lower bills, greater comfort, and a system that works alongside a cleaner grid. Merino makes the hard part easy. They take the best way to heat and cool a home, put a battery and brain inside it, and turn the heat pump into something everyday people can order, buy, and install themselves.
Opportunity in a non tech-enabled market
Every Merino unit learns the patterns of its space and the people in it, and the home as a whole turns into a more intelligent and comfortable version of itself. The underlying heat pump tech (the same refrigeration cycle as a kitchen fridge) has been mature for decades, and incentives, awareness, and hardware improvements have all increased. However, the heat pump industry has long treated complex installation as an immutable fact. The result is installation vastly exceeds the expense and utility of the product itself. By redesigning the heat pump around the lived experience, Merino has turned a byzantine engineering problem into a consumer product people can buy and install themselves.
Making heating and cooling a DIY project
Once installation can be done in under an hour by the DIY homeowner or local electrician, heat pumps will be adopted ubiquitously. They are a radically superior technology compared to a gas boiler and run 3-4x cheaper. As the scale of consumer adoption ramps, manufacturing learning rates ensue, pushing down the cost of manufacturing and reinforcing scale economies. This drives network effects as the home comfort intelligence becomes smarter with every unit installed. Latent demand is awakened, and every unit becomes a grid-interactive node, earning revenue and balancing the system for life.
Consumer products focus
The founders of Merino previously built hardware that is indistinguishable from magic - Tesla’s that update themselves, AirPods that pair instantly, Square readers that make anyone an instant shopkeeper. The common thread: burying complexity beneath an interface and design that is so natural anyone can use it. They took those learnings and landed on the fact that in heat pump design all the engineering firepower was pointed away from the actual user experience. Their insight: a heat pump design should start with a jaw-dropping customer experience at installation and first operation.
End State
Intelligent, electrified HVAC appliances will become an indispensable component of housing. Stunningly beautiful design and a mind-blowingly better customer experience drives scaled adoption and enables a flexible, more distributed grid. Electrification goes from a tough sell to the obvious choice because it amplifies customer experience.
Highlights
2025
Merino is founded by Mary-Ann Rau and Brad Hall
2025
Pre-Seed led by Onto
2026
Launched the Merino Mono, Merino’s first consumer heat pump product
“Every single product I've worked on has ended up creating a version of that product that became so accessible that it became essentially ubiquitous. That's what I want to do with heat pumps. We don't need to go back into a lab and invent new science. We have to figure out how to make products that scale faster, become more accessible, and create a better experience. That's what I've been doing my entire career.”
Mary-Ann Rau
Co-founder & CEO, Merino
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