# Base Power $1B Series D On **August 3, 2026**, [[Base Power]] closed a **$1 billion Series D at a $13 billion valuation**, announced alongside the launch of its 39.2 kWh Base Core home battery. Total funding now exceeds $2.5B. **Co-leads:** [[Ribbit Capital]], Addition, [[Valor Equity Partners]], and [[JPMorgan Chase]]'s Strategic Investment Group (part of the bank's Security and Resiliency Initiative). **Participating:** Altimeter, D1 Capital Partners, Sands Capital, [[Coatue Management]], Layer Global, Energy Impact Partners. **Re-investing existing backers:** [[Thrive Capital]], [[Andreessen Horowitz]], Lightspeed, Trust Ventures, CapitalG. --- ## The founder pedigree is the finding Three VC firms tracked on this site appear in this round. The more interesting fact is who they are funding. **[[Zach Dell]]**, co-founder and CEO, worked at [[Blackstone]] and then at **[[Thrive Capital]]** before starting Base Power in 2023. Thrive is an existing backer and re-invested here. A firm writing a check into a company founded by its own alumnus is ordinary venture practice — and it is also the closed-loop pattern the vault tracks: capital, deal flow, and founders circulating inside a small network rather than being sourced from outside it. **[[Justin Lopas]]**, co-founder and COO, worked at **[[SpaceX]]** — Falcon 9 and Starship — and then at **[[Anduril]]**. So this is not a generic energy round. It is a **[[Thrive Capital]] alumnus and an [[Anduril]]/[[SpaceX]] operator** building capital-intensive physical infrastructure, funded by the same network both came from. The defense-tech operator diaspora is now seeding adjacent hardware sectors, carrying its operating style with it: vertical integration, hardware iteration speed, and a willingness to fight regulators. --- ## What the business actually is Base leases home batteries to residential customers, then aggregates the fleet into a virtual power plant that sells grid-balancing services back to utilities. The customer gets backup power and a cheaper bill; Base gets a distributed generation asset without owning the land it sits on. It started in [[Texas]], where the 2021 winter storm created both the demand and the political opening, and has since expanded beyond it. --- ## Why a battery company belongs in this vault Two reasons, neither of them about batteries. **Grid capacity is now an AI-industry input.** The compute build-out documented across the [[SpaceX-Anthropic Compute Deal]], [[OpenAI-Oracle Stargate Expansion]], and [[Google-SpaceX xAI Compute Deal]] files runs into a hard physical constraint at the substation. Distributed storage is one of the few things that relieves it without a decade of transmission permitting, which makes it strategically adjacent to the same capital pool. **Privatized resilience is a political posture.** A fleet of privately owned home batteries that stabilizes a public grid is a genuine engineering solution and also an argument — that reliability is a product you buy rather than a service the state provides. Texas is where that argument is being tested at scale. ## See Also - [[Base Power]] - [[Zach Dell]] - [[Justin Lopas]] - [[Thrive Capital]] - [[Andreessen Horowitz]] - [[Valor Equity Partners]] - [[JPMorgan Chase]] - [[Ribbit Capital]] - [[Texas]]