Austin Startup Raises $1 Billion To Keep Texans’ Lights On

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Austin-based startup Base Power announced it raised a billion dollars in Series C financing. Its goal: Keep the lights on during the next winter storm.

The company, co-founded by Zach Dell, aims to install batteries that offer on-site energy storage options for customers. The company launched in 2023.

“The chance to reinvent our power system comes once in a generation,” said Dell in a press release. “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.”

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According to the release, the company has partnerships with homebuilders and serves homeowners in Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and the Houston area.

The company is currently building its first energy storage and power electronics factory in downtown Austin at the former building for the Austin American-Statesman, the city's newspaper.

“Austin is the place where innovation is happening. I think we’re seeing a lot of technology companies, a lot of hardware companies in particular coming to Austin, and as a born and raised Austinite, it’s just incredibly fun to see,” Dell said. “And I’m just really excited for the next decade of growth in Austin and building the company here and attracting the best and brightest to the city,” he told KXAN in 2024.

The financing comes from investors Addition, Trust Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Thrive Capital, Lightspeed, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, StepStone, Elad Gil, 137 Ventures, Terrain, and Waybury. New major investors include Ribbit, CapitalG, Spark, BOND, Lowercarbon, Avenir, Glade Brook, Positive Sum, and 1789.

“We’re building domestic manufacturing capacity for fixing the grid,” Justin Lopas, COO and co-founder of Base Power, said in the same release. “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 reindustrializing America and reinventing the grid.”

The Base Power battery system can hold 20 kilowatt-hours of energy. They are designed to handle local outages, like those experienced during the 2021 Winter Storm. They’re built from lithium iron phosphate.

The installation fee for a battery system is $695, followed by $19 a month subscription.