Base Power raises $1B Series D at $13B valuation and opens Texas battery factory

Base Power raises $1B Series D at $13B valuation, opens Austin battery factory

Base Power has raised $1 billion in a Series D at a $13 billion post-money valuation, bringing total funding to $2.5 billion. The round was announced alongside the opening of Factory One, a battery manufacturing facility built inside the former Austin American-Statesman printing press building. The factory broke ground roughly five months ago and is already producing.

The business model is straightforward: Base Power designs, manufactures, and installs batteries on homes, then owns and operates those systems as a distributed power plant. Customers pay for electricity at a fixed monthly rate, with the battery providing backup protection when the grid goes down. The grid-support function is how Base Power monetizes. Batteries charge when energy is abundant and discharge into homes during peak demand, with excess capacity pushed back onto the grid.

“Today, we're announcing three different things. Number one, launch of the factory that I'm sitting in right now that builds batteries. Number two is $1,000,000,000 raise at $13,000,000,000 post money valuation. And the third thing is Base Core — our custom, fully custom designed, engineered, installed, manufactured here in Texas. We design batteries. We manufacture them here. We hold them on homes, and then we own and operate them as a distributed fleet, distributed power plant.”

How the grid logic works

Peak demand patterns vary by region. In Texas and the South, stress typically hits between 4 and 7 PM in summer, when solar supply drops off and households return home. In Texas winters and colder northern markets, early morning peaks emerge as heating loads run before sunrise. Beyond those macro patterns, Base Power's fleet can respond at the neighborhood level, discharging batteries in a specific pocket of Houston or Dallas where a local line needs support. Lopez argues that scale is what makes that granular dispatch possible.

Manufacturing approach

Factory One uses a phased automation model. Robots currently handle battery cell stacking, a task Lopez describes as heavy, repetitive, and precision-dependent. Manual labor covers components and testing that require more dexterity. The operating principle, in Lopez's words, is to delete a task before optimizing it and optimize before automating. The goal over time is more automation, but the factory is not targeting fully lights-out production at this stage.

Geographic expansion

Base Power operates across major Texas markets and recently launched in Chicago, with six or seven utility partnerships in Texas. Lopez says the company will likely be in 10 to 15 or 20 states over the next few years, deliberately limited. Geographic density reduces installation and service costs, and the factory's output capacity imposes a natural constraint on how fast the footprint can grow.

Expansion paths split along regulatory lines. In deregulated markets like parts of Texas, Base Power can enter without a utility deal. In regulated states like California, the sales motion is B2B: approach the utility, offer megawatts as a service, and negotiate with both the utility and state regulators. Lopez expects several new regulated utility deals and a few new deregulated states to close before year-end.

Texas, Lopez notes, carries more electricity load than most European countries, which gives some context for why the company has stayed focused there as long as it has.