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Base Power, the Texas startup designing and installing very large home batteries for close to free, just pulled in an additional $200 million to fund its growth.
Silicon Valley heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz co-led the Series B with Addition, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Valor Equity Partners. They were joined by previous investors including Thrive Capital, Altimeter, Terrain, and Trust Ventures.
“It will fuel the next phase of growth,” Base Power co-founder and CEO Zach Dell told Canary Media. Besides ramping up installations in the company’s home market of Texas, that growth will include breaking ground on a domestic factory to manufacture home battery systems and busting out of Texas to sell in other states.
The sizable investment delivers a major vote of confidence in Base Power’s approach to a market that’s been tough for American companies to crack in a scalable way: connected, distributed energy. Base Power equips households with batteries for backup during outages, as long as they agree to buy power from the company and let it dispatch the batteries into Texas’ competitive energy markets managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. When all the pieces come together, this model gives homeowners cheaper, more reliable power while making the overall electricity system more cost-effective and stable, not to mention cleaner.
It’s a beloved concept in clean energy circles, promising to decarbonize the grid while skipping the delays and expenses associated with upgrading the macro electricity system. But the distributed-energy vision for batteries hasn’t minted many standout successes for venture investors.
Each of the 50 states regulates the power sector differently. In some states, like Texas, companies can aggregate small-scale batteries and earn money by bidding them into power markets; other states require such activities to run through a monopoly utility, which may or may not be interested in disrupting its own business. Base Power will need to adapt its strategy to grow steadily nationwide, but the company is already testing a new structure for working with legacy utilities.
It’s a turbulent time for cleantech investment generally, but Base Power raised its new financing from a group of VCs that aren’t primarily focused on climate or clean energy as a vertical. Dell and co. made that happen by showing rapid customer adoption.
“Often you see projections change, and they’ve been very consistent about doing what they say they’re going to do,” said Willem Van Lancker, partner at early-stage investment firm Terrain. Terrain made its first investment in Base Power’s seed round and is one of several previous investors who doubled down in the latest round. “The people that have been along for the journey since the beginning have witnessed the execution,” he added.
Base Power incorporated in June 2023 and launched its commercial product in May 2024. Since then, Dell said, the staff has grown to 100 people serving thousands of customers and earning millions of dollars in revenue. In-house teams are installing 20 home battery systems per day, which added up to 10 megawatt-hours installed just last month, a number Dell expects to exceed in April.
A typical customer gets either 25 or 50 kilowatt-hours of storage installed for just a few hundred dollars up-front and a minimum three-year commitment to buy retail power from Base. Those are significantly bigger batteries than the norm for residential storage.
Between the large battery design and the rapid pace of customer-driven installations, this decentralized battery fleet is starting to add up. Indeed, Dell expects to hit 100 megawatt-hours installed by mid-summer, equivalent to one of the larger utility-scale batteries operating in ERCOT. (Some go up to a few hundred megawatt-hours.)
But even in regulation-light Texas, grid-scale batteries take several years to develop, permit, and install, whereas efficient home batteries can reach customers in a matter of weeks. By this summer, Dell said Base Power will be installing more megawatt-hours per month in ERCOT than any other developer of large or small batteries, though he did not share a specific target rate.
This is, admittedly, a tricky metric to standardize across scales of battery project. For comparison, utility-scale developer esVolta is bringing 980 megawatt-hours online this year in Texas across three projects. But factoring in time spent on permits, land acquisition, and interconnection queues lowers the effective rate of megawatt-hours added per month of effort on those projects.
Just a few years ago, $200 million would have been a record size for an equity round in the stationary-energy-storage sector. In 2019, for instance, unorthodox Energy Vault, which proposed storing power by stacking blocks with towering six-armed cranes, pulled in $110 million for its Series B, the largest such investment in a grid-storage venture at the time.
Others have surpassed that since then, like Form Energy’s $450 million Series E for a novel iron-based battery. But those investments went to large-scale storage technology plays, not small-scale, aggregated storage models, which typically draw more modest sums from wonky climatetech specialists.
Dell declined to dwell too much on the robust quantity of new cash in hand.
“Fundraising is the ability to keep executing,” Dell said. “The things we should celebrate are customers and revenue and products.”
Base Power will use some of its new funds to accelerate development of its own battery factory in Texas, Dell noted. The company is now searching for a site, with a focus on the Austin area, and could break ground by the end of the year.
Currently, Base Power uses contract manufacturers to turn its residential battery designs into a physical product; some but not all of the system is assembled in China.
That makes Base Power’s supply chain vulnerable to President Donald Trump’s barrage of new tariffs, which raise the cost of imports from longstanding trading partners and geopolitical adversaries alike. The storage industry is still figuring out the damage from these tariffs; even domestic battery-cell production depends on imports for precursor materials, but some critical minerals are exempt from the latest tariffs.
Dell said that the push for domestic manufacturing was always part of the plan, though, given Base Power’s commitment to “compounding cost advantage through vertical integration.”
“Doing it ourselves we can take more cost out of the system,” Dell explained. He envisions the factory producing thousands of units per week.
Then there’s the matter of geographical expansion.
“They can build a very, very large business just inside Texas,” Van Lancker said. “That being said, the plans will allow them to expand outside of Texas.”
Base Power will need to work with utilities to operate in areas that lack the retail choice and open competitive markets that Texas enjoys. Where appropriate, Base will partner with regulated utilities and sell them “capacity as a service.” In other words, Base Power would install its batteries in homes, but instead of playing the markets itself with that capacity, the startup can hand the keys to a utility to help meet growing demand for power at peak hours, or other grid needs.
The startup rolled out this model in March with Bandera Electric Cooperative, a 29,000-member utility in Texas Hill Country. (A fraction of Texans still get their power from vertically integrated cooperative or municipal utilities.) Bandera Electric offers its customer-owners this backup power for a monthly subscription with no up-front cost; the cooperative dispatches the batteries based on its own strategy — and pays Base Power for that ability.
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