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Investment in cleantech startups is tracking toward the lowest level in years. But Base Power shrugged off the market trends and just raised $1 billion to turbocharge its home battery buildout.
The colossal Series C funding round comes only six months after it raised $200 million in an April Series B. Addition led the latest round, which brought back all previous investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Valor Equity Partners. The company’s valuation now stands at $4 billion after receiving the new investment, Base Power founder and CEO Zach Dell said.
The pace and scale of those investments put the Austin, Texas–based firm in a league of its own among clean energy startups this year — beating out even the outlandish $863 million that Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised in August. Dell says his company’s traction comes down to a very clear value proposition: It’s potentially the fastest way to expand on-demand grid power at a time when everyone wants more of it.
“Right now, we’re in a capacity crunch — everyone needs capacity,” Dell said. “We install capacity faster and cheaper than really anyone out there.”
The U.S. is going through the fastest electricity demand growth in decades, as AI data centers proliferate, more factories open up, and customers purchase electric vehicles. Utilities have long maintained a skeptical stance toward startups’ plans to turn home energy devices into substantial forces on the grid; now, Dell said, they’re not just willing but “more excited than ever” to have that conversation.
The key to Base Power’s model is finding households in Texas who want cheap electricity with the benefit of backup power. The company becomes their retail power provider and installs one or two unusually large batteries on-site. Base owns the batteries, and the customers pay an installation fee starting at $695 and a small monthly rate instead of purchasing them for many thousands of dollars. Then the startup aggregates this dispersed fleet of batteries to essentially create miniature power plants it can profit from in the state’s competitive energy market.
The batteries earn money through simple arbitrage: They charge up when wind or solar production pushes prices down and then discharge when demand and prices spike. Base Power also earned certification to deliver ancillary services, which are rapid-fire adjustments to maintain grid reliability, for which batteries are uniquely suited. The company has already maxed out the 20 megawatts it can bid through the Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource pilot, a virtual-power-plant program, and is pushing for the cap to be raised, Dell said.
Base Power has begun selling its services to regulated utilities so that they can help their customers with backup power and free up more grid capacity. And Dell is scoping out other geographical markets where the rules could allow the Base Power model to grow. But for now, Texas is the ideal place to start. It not only has the competitive market run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, but it is also awash in more utility-scale solar and wind than any other state, enhancing the value of battery-based arbitrage.
When Dell spoke to Canary Media for the previous fundraise, he employed 100 people, and his in-house teams were installing 20 home battery systems per day, for a total of about 10 megawatt-hours in March. Now Base Power employs 250 people and installs double that rate. A year from now, Dell wants to install 100 megawatt-hours per month.
That’s a brash goal for a 2-year-old company. But Base Power has actually followed through on its goals, a rare distinction among buzzy cleantech startups. In April, Dell had promised 100 megawatt-hours of cumulative installations by midsummer; he hit that target and is now approaching 150 megawatt-hours.
The firm has also been planning to move from contract manufacturing for its bespoke battery enclosures to in-house manufacturing. In April, Dell said he planned to break ground on a factory near Austin by the end of the year. Now the company has leased the old Austin American-Statesman newspaper headquarters in the heart of town and has begun moving in manufacturing equipment.
“It’s a 90,000-square-foot empty warehouse that happens to be right across the street from our HQ. There’s massive amounts of benefits you get from colocating engineering and manufacturing — having the engineers be really close to the factory, being able to walk the line and make iterations in real time.”
This factory will take imported battery cells and build the modules, packs, and power electronics needed to turn them into large home-battery products. The plan is to start manufacturing in the first quarter of 2026 and ramp up to 4 gigawatt-hours per year of production capacity, Dell said. This supply chain strategy also shores up compliance with new federal rules limiting tax credits for batteries that contain too much content from China.
Base Power is already finalizing a location for a “much, much larger” facility outside Austin to continue growing its manufacturing capacity.
Other startups have opted for “capital light” strategies to get solar or batteries into the hands of customers. Base Power, in contrast, went capital-heavy, fronting the money to design, own, and install the batteries with the expectation of making future profits on their capacity. It’s too soon to know how that business bet will play out over years, but Dell indicated the early returns were attractive.
“It’s hard to raise a billion dollars without that,” he noted. “The math is indeed mathing.”
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