Back
Home batteries tend to come in two flavors. There are the no-frills, portable systems meant for emergencies, not for full-on integration with solar panels or the power grid. And then there are the Tesla Powerwalls of the world: smart, large devices that can power an entire home but which require a lot of time and money to install.
Cole Ashman, CEO of Pila Energy, wanted to build a battery that combines the best of both of those options — something that is affordable and useful in an emergency but also able to help customers on a daily basis. His years of work at smart-electrical-panel startup Span and as a Powerwall engineer at Tesla gave him the technical chops. His experience growing up in New Orleans and witnessing the aftermath of post-Hurricane Katrina power outages gave him the motivation.
“There’s this need for energy resilience — and hurdles for adoption that exist today,” he said. “We want to bring forward this notion that you don’t have to compromise on the not-so-smart battery or overspend on the primo solution. This is a middle ground.”
The result, the Pila Mesh Home Battery, debuted at the South by Southwest 2025 conference in Texas this spring. On Tuesday, Pila announced it has raised $4 million to scale up manufacturing, via a seed funding round led by R7 Partners and joined by Toyota Ventures, Refactor Capital, GS Futures, and others. The startup aims to deliver its first batteries to customers in early 2026.
Pila’s 1.6-kilowatt-hour batteries retail for $1,299, which is more than what you’d spend for another portable battery with roughly equivalent storage capacity. But unlike the typical portable backup battery, Pila’s sleek, briefcase-sized units are designed to be a constant companion for key home appliances. Set-up is simple: Just plug the battery into a standard wall outlet and connect the equipment you want backed up.
Take a refrigerator — one of the most important things to keep powered when the electricity goes out. Ashman recalled seeing thousands of them on New Orleans street curbs following Hurricane Katrina, abandoned after multiday power outages left them filled with spoiled food.
One Pila battery can power a typical refrigerator for 32 hours, or double that for customers that tack on an “expansion pack.” It also comes with wireless sensors that can be placed inside a fridge to monitor internal temperatures and with on-board sensors that can detect signs of incipient failure of refrigerator compressors from fluctuations in electricity use.
Pila’s batteries don’t just provide value to their owners during blackouts; the devices are also functional when the grid is up and running. They can be programmed to store energy when it’s cheap — say, during midday hours when grid prices are low or rooftop solar is abundant — and deploy that power during afternoon or evening hours, when households often pay higher rates for electricity from utilities.
These are the kinds of features that come standard with large, high-end home batteries like the Tesla Powerwall, sonnenCore+, Enphase IQ, and FranklinWH. But a typical Powerwall costs between $12,000 and $16,000 to buy and install — and the vast majority of them are in owner-occupied single-family homes that went through fairly extensive permitting and utility interconnection processes.
Pila batteries, by contrast, are what Ashman describes as “permissionless” energy infrastructure.
“You don’t ask for permission to put in a new refrigerator,” he said. “Why does this have to be any different?”
That puts Pila in a category of “do-it-yourself” energy systems that are gaining traction around the world.
Take balcony solar systems, which now power more than a million households in Germany and are starting to take off in other European countries. These portable panels generate only a fraction of what rooftop solar systems can provide, but they cost a lot less and can simply plug into an outlet — a much simpler process than getting a professionally installed rooftop array.
Yet balcony solar hasn’t caught on in the U.S., where electrical codes put strict limits on devices that send power back into household circuits. For now, Pila’s software is configured to only allow power to flow from wall sockets into its batteries, not vice versa, Ashman emphasized.
However, as more states pass laws promoting DIY solar and as electrical codes evolve to allow intelligently controlled devices to safely deliver power through wall sockets into household circuits, Pila Mesh batteries can flip to serve that task, Ashman said.
The do-it-yourself design also makes Pila batteries suitable for renters and people living in multifamily housing, who are largely locked out of the solar and battery market today, he said — a frustration Ashman himself has experienced as a renter in New York City.
Consumers want to be able to adopt batteries, solar panels, EV chargers, and the latest all-electric appliances as they see fit, said Andrew Krause, CEO of Northern Pacific Power Systems, a California-based contractor that specializes in solar and battery installations. He’s involved in the Agile Electrification coalition, a group of companies and researchers working to overcome barriers to people electrifying their homes.
“It’s important not to view these things as standalone assets, because as standalone assets they’re marginal. A Pila battery on the grid looks like a vacuum cleaner,” Krause said. “But I’m buying a Pila battery because I have solar on my roof, and I’m trying to handle certain end-use loads that will benefit from a battery and solar, and for which I don’t want to overcommit for a whole-home battery system.”
“It’s just a fractional Powerwall,” he said.
That ethos is appealing to Mackey Saturday, an investor at R7 Partners, which led this week’s investment in Pila. He splits his time between a New York City apartment and a home in Nosara, Costa Rica — and he’d like to have more flexible options for backup power in both places.
“In Costa Rica, while power is readily available, it’s consistently on and off,” he said. “If you want to keep your critical appliances available — not resetting clocks, not having food waste, not having your internet die — that’s hugely valuable.”
Meanwhile, “in New York we have pretty reliable energy,” he said. “But we also have some pretty challenging weather as of late,” like the June heat wave that forced utilities and government officials to issue emergency alerts asking people to conserve energy.
Someday, when Pila’s batteries get the OK to send electricity back to the grid, they could help relieve pressure on the power system, Ashman said.
Ashman highlighted numerous features that could allow Pila batteries to work together as virtual power plants, starting with the wireless mesh network built into each system. The network runs on a 900-megahertz band and allows the batteries to communicate through the walls of a home or even “a 200-unit New York City skyscraper,” he said.
Each battery also contains a cellular modem along with WiFi connections to ensure that individual and meshed batteries have multiple ways to stay in contact with their owners, building managers, or utility control centers, Ashman said. That kind of redundancy is a must-have for eventual use as a grid asset, he added.
Pila is in preliminary discussions with utilities on this front, although it isn’t naming any names. But Ashman noted that the startup presented alongside other providers of plug-and-play home-energy tech, like CraftStrom Solar, at a September pitchfest hosted by the California utility Pacific Gas and Electric.
U.S. utilities have a decidedly mixed track record in terms of how they treat customers installing rooftop solar and backup batteries. Across the country, utilities have campaigned to claw back net-metering incentives for consumers who send solar energy back to the grid, seeing that framework as a threat to electricity sales and a risk to the power system’s stability.
But utility regulators and policymakers are increasingly eager to use these distributed technologies to avoid expensive upgrades to the grid. As electricity demand grows and these cost pressures become more acute, the appeal of systems like Pila’s could grow even larger.
“We’re firm believers that batteries will be inside everything,” Ashman said, echoing a conviction shared by an increasing number of startups, especially in the induction-stove sector. “But we need those batteries to be smart. Having an unintelligent battery in everything might be good for backup, but it doesn’t help solve broader problems in the home or for energy.”
.svg)
