Base Power Co-Founder Justin Lopas (@JLopas) says most home battery products are sold to "wealthy people" and typically paired with solar, but Base is focused on building batteries to support the grid:
"If you look at other competitive battery products that are sold mostly to wealthy people at very high cost, they're small, typically wall-mounted, take a long time to install, and aren't focused on supporting the grid."
"This is a totally different play on grid batteries. Instead of big shipping container batteries, we chopped it up into a bunch of little pieces and we put it at the edge of the grid. That's what this is. This is a grid-focused battery."
Video
Molly O’Shea (@MollySOShea)
BREAKING: Base Power Raises $1 Billion Series D, Hitting $13 Billion Valuation & Launching "Base Core"
First-of-its-Kind Home Battery Built in the USA
$2.5B+ in total funding to date
Co-Founder Justin Lopas (@JLopas) gives us a Factory 1 tour in Austin, Texas
Founded in 2023, by Justin & Zach Dell (@ZachBDell). @basepowerco designs, manufactures, & installs home batteries that back up the house & support the grid
Just 10 months after their Series C, this round was led by Micky Malka's Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, & JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group, with participation from Altimeter, D1 Capital Partners, Sands Capital, Coatue, Layer Global, & Energy Impact Partners
Base’s major existing investors are re-investing, including Thrive Capital, a16z, Lightspeed, Trust Ventures, CapitalG, & more
"It is so critical to bring manufacturing back to the US, especially for critical infrastructure."
"It's a vertical integration thesis. We can cut down cost. We can reduce lead time. We can change the hardware much more quickly."
We Cover:
› Base Core, 40 kWh with a 20 kW inverter, roughly 3X a conventional home battery
› Whole home backup, installed in under an hour
› Fleet past 500 MWh, over 100 installs a day
› 200+ MW of utility partnerships with El Paso Electric, Austin Energy, & CoServ
› Factory 1 built in 6 months, targeting 4,000 units a week by year end
› 100% US and Mexico supply chain
› Batteries installed around data centers to offset interconnection load
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Justin Lopas, Co-Founder & COO, Base Power
(01:06) Base Power raises $1B Series D
(02:26) Meet Base Core
(05:42) Demo: Whole-home backup in action
(07:06) How Base Power's business model works
(08:55) Inside Base Power's Factory
(11:28) Why Base Core is 3x larger than other home batteries
(12:05) Inside the manufacturing line
(13:23) Can humanoid robots build batteries?
(14:13) Why Base Power manufactures its own batteries
(15:47) Inside the robotic assembly line
(18:09) How lithium-ion batteries work
(21:40) Scaling production to 4,000 units a week
(22:33) Installing 100+ systems a day
(23:03) COO or Electrician?
(23:53) From oil rigs to Base Power
Video
— https://nitter.net/MollySOShea/status/2084270564873490686#m