Austin-based energy startup Base Power has raised $1 billion in a Series C funding round led by venture firm Addition. Major existing investors, including Trust Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Thrive Capital, Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, StepStone, Elad Gil, and others, participated alongside new backers Ribbit, CapitalG, Spark, BOND, Lowercarbon, Avenir, Glade Brook, Positive Sum, and 1789.
Base Power is focused on modernising the U.S. power grid by deploying distributed battery storage systems at homeowners’ residences. Zach Dell, CEO and co-founder of Base Power, said, “The chance to reinvent our power system comes once in a generation. The challenge ahead requires the best engineers and operators to solve it, and we’re scaling the team to make our abundant energy future a reality.”
Building next-gen energy grid
Base Power’s model leases home batteries with competitive upfront and monthly costs, providing customers with reliable backup power and the ability to sell surplus electricity back to the grid. This network of distributed batteries also supports grid stability, addressing challenges posed by America’s ageing and increasingly fragile power infrastructure.
To scale its mission, Base Power is building its first energy storage and power electronics factory in downtown Austin at the former Austin American-Statesman printing press site, with plans for additional facilities. The company recently qualified for Texas’s Aggregated Distributed Energy Resource program, enabling aggregated batteries to sell electricity directly into the grid, which enhances reliability and reduces costs.
Lopas added, “ We’re building domestic manufacturing capacity for fixing the grid. The only way to add capacity to the grid is physically deploying hardware, and we need to make that here in the U.S., ourselves. This factory in Austin is our first, and we’re already planning for our second. We’re building the infrastructure, systems, tools, processes, supporting software, and team that’s reindustrialising America and reinventing the grid.”
