Base Power, an Austin-based battery and energy startup cofounded by Zach Dell, the son of the tech titan Michael Dell, has raised $1 billion in recent fundraising, the company announced on Wednesday — an eye-catching sum that indicates the two-year-old firm is fast emerging as a major player within Texas’ crowded energy marketplace.
The whopping Series C, or late-stage, fundraising round was led by some of the country’s most prominent venture capital firms and individual angel investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Valor Equity Partners and Elad Gil.
The raise announcement comes soon after Base Power leased the former Austin American-Statesman complex to use temporarily as a production factory. Base Power is also planning for a second factory, Justin Lopas, another cofounder, said in a statement, as it works toward its mission of “building domestic manufacturing capacity for fixing the grid.”
“The only way to add capacity to the grid is physically deploying hardware,” Lopas added, “and we need to make that here in the U.S., ourselves … We’re building the infrastructure, systems, tools, processes, supporting software, and team that’s reindustrializing America and reinventing the grid.”
The startup manufactures huge batteries that it leases and installs for homeowners as a residential backup power system to be used during severe weather or other times of high demand. It also sells its electricity at relatively low fixed rates, and uses tech systems to work in conjunction with the larger grid and power its batteries when electricity is cheap.
To date, the company says it has deployed more than 100 megawatt-hours of energy capacity to homes in the Austin, Houston and D-FW metro areas, or enough energy to power tens of thousands of homes for one hour.
Zach Dell, 29, has consistently framed the endeavor, which has also pulled in engineers from high-profile companies like SpaceX and Tesla, as a high-stakes move to reshape Texas’ chaotic and sometimes unreliable electricity market.
“The chance to reinvent our power system comes once in a generation,” Dell said in a statement. “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.”
