Base Power raises $1B to get big batteries into more homes

Home battery startup Base Power seems constitutionally incapable of standing still. After raising $1 billion last October, the Texas company has raised another $1 billion, and upped its valuation from $4 billion to $13 billion.

The latest investment, led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, amounts to one of the largest validations so far for the theory that small-scale energy devices can play a role in meeting the nation’s ravenous demand for new power. 

Households could easily spend more than $10,000 to buy their own batteries, but Base Power installs unusually powerful batteries at customers’ homes for an up-front fee ($95 to $695, depending on location) plus an ongoing electricity supply subscription. This model lets more homes access emergency backup power when the grid goes down, and cheaper power on normal days. In exchange, Base Power uses those energy storage systems to provide power to the grid when it’s most stressed — a service that makes money for the company.

Clean energy advocates have called for this kind of distributed energy model for years, saying that generating and storing power in homes and businesses can make more sense than relying on an increasingly expensive centralized grid, if only someone would compensate the systems properly. The market has been slow to heed their calls. But now AI companies are paying top dollar for energy wherever they can find it, and the idea of controlling thousands of dispatchable home batteries lights up investors like never before.

“There’s a real need on the grid for capacity in Illinois and Texas and frankly everywhere else in the U.S. now,” said Base Power co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Justin Lopas. ​“Distributed batteries are a way that we can add meaningful capacity to the grid.” 

In less than three years of operating, Base Power has installed batteries at 17,000 homes, mostly in Texas but recently in Illinois as well. With the ability to provide more than 500 megawatt-hours of power, that aggregated fleet stores as much energy as one of the large utility-scale batteries you could find in the Texas countryside or the California desert. But those projects take years of development and permitting before they can enter construction, while Base Power installers add multiple batteries in a day. 

The new funding will equip Base Power to expand its team and increase the rate of installs, Lopas said. But the company has also been working to speed deployments another way: by taking over its own supply chain.

Base Power has been installing batteries that were manufactured to its specifications by a ​“non-China” overseas supplier, Lopas said. Now, the company has multiple production lines up and running in the former Austin American-Statesman newspaper building in Austin, Texas. This means products can come off the line and go right on a truck for delivery, instead of getting shipped in from overseas. 

Base Power’s engineers finessed their design to make life easier for the company’s in-house installers. Many home batteries are mounted on walls, but Base Power has decided to go a different route.

“Ours are installed on the ground, not the wall,” Lopas said. ​“That simplifies the install, and you don’t have to carry different screws for brick and stone and siding and all this other stuff.” 

Base Power has a contract to begin sourcing domestic battery cells by the end of the year, and already buys all the data-processing ​“smart” components for the battery systems from the U.S., to improve cybersecurity. That also sets up the company to avoid bureaucratic snarls around electronics from China; the White House recently banned new foreign inverters on national security grounds.

The new Base Core model coming off the line in Austin also packs more of a punch in terms of energy. It can push 20 kilowatts of instantaneous power, and stores nearly 40 kilowatt-hours. That’s far beyond the conventional format popularized by the Tesla Powerwall, which discharges 5 kilowatts and stores 14 kilowatt-hours. Customers can stack more than one Base Core for even more storage.

“Our financial model is very aligned with our customers,” Lopas said. ​“They want as long a duration of backup as they can get, and we want to put as much energy as we can on the home.” 

Now the company has a vast war chest to hire more installers, who will each install more energy capacity per visit. Different states are working on mechanisms to nudge AI hyperscalers to pay for distributed energy to meet some of their capacity needs. Those policies are in their infancy, but Base Power sees plenty of runway to grow using the current market rules in Texas and Illinois, Lopas said. The startup also works with utilities to set up home battery networks to solve grid problems, a model that could scale in the states that lack a Texas-style competitive power market.