Base Power raises $1B Series C and opens its first Austin factory to scale home battery storage across Texas

Summary

Base Power, an Austin-based home battery company, closes a $1 billion Series C and opens its first manufacturing facility in Austin — two announcements that frame a company moving from regional operator to something with national ambitions.

What Base Power does

Base Power designs, manufactures, installs, owns, and operates batteries on residential homes, then acts as the homeowner's power provider. It charges batteries when grid demand is low and discharges them during peak hours, effectively flattening the demand curve without requiring utilities to build new poles and wires. Justin, co-founder and COO, frames it simply: add cars to the highway at 2 a.m., pull them off at 6 p.m.

The company now operates across Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, with thousands of homes on its network and over 100 megawatt-hours of deployed storage. It claims to be the largest and fastest-growing energy storage developer in Texas.

Market entry logic

Base's ideal market is deregulated, where it can become the homeowner's direct electricity provider. In regulated markets it runs a B2B-to-consumer model, securing a utility agreement first and then selling direct to homeowners, with the utility retaining power sales but gaining access to Base's distributed battery fleet.

Next targets, per Justin, include Northern Virginia and other data-center-dense regions, markets with heavy renewables requiring time-shifting, and constrained grid environments like Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

Why electricity bills are rising

Justin's read on the 14-to-19-cent-per-kilowatt-hour increase since 2020 cuts against the AI-centric narrative. The cost of electricity generation is actually falling, driven by cheaper solar, wind, and natural gas. What's rising is delivery — the cost of the grid itself, the poles and wires — and that's the problem Base is trying to solve. He doesn't dismiss AI demand, but notes that adding an EV to the grid is the equivalent of adding an entire home, making AI one factor among several.

Tariffs and the factory

When Liberation Day tariffs hit earlier this year, the company was flagged as a potential casualty given its hardware dependency. Justin says Base navigated it by reshoring the vast majority of its supply chain and leaning on a supply chain and engineering team flexible enough to redesign components quickly. The Austin factory — opened alongside the Series C announcement — is the structural answer: manufacturing next-generation hardware domestically, with many component suppliers based in Texas. Being a young company without a decades-old offshore supply chain made the pivot significantly easier than it would have been for an incumbent.

Scale of the opportunity

Texas alone has 8 million single-family homes in territories Base can serve today, with another 4 million coming into reach soon. That's a single state. Justin's pitch to prospective hires and investors is that the company is still small relative to the total addressable market, and that the grid's structural underinvestment — against a backdrop of rising AI, EV, and electrification demand — makes the timing unusually favorable.