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.
Rapid growth in Texas energy market
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.
