Base Power raises $1B to roll out its giant new home battery
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- Base Power unveiled Core, a 39.2-kWh LFP home battery it says stores roughly three times the capacity of a typical home battery, can keep a house running for up to 36 hours, and installs in under an hour.
- Core switches a home to battery power in 50 milliseconds during an outage, operates between -22°F and 122°F, carries an IP67 submersion rating, and includes a built-in port for recharging from a portable generator or solar.
- Base Power retains ownership of Core: customers sign up for a plan rather than buying the hardware outright — Base advertises a $695 installation fee and a $19 monthly membership in Oncor territory — and the company aggregates the batteries into a virtual power plant that sells back to the grid when wholesale prices spike.
- Base Power raised $1 billion in a Series D at a $13 billion post-investment valuation, led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group, bringing total capital raised to more than $2.5 billion.
- Since its previous $1B round in October 2025, Base Power grew its deployed fleet from more than 100 MWh to more than 500 MWh, expanded from Texas into Illinois, and launched utility programs with El Paso Electric, Austin Energy, and CoServ totaling more than 200 MW of capacity.
- Base Factory 1 in Austin is now producing thousands of Core systems a month, with in-house crews handling installation as the company prepares to use the new funding to hire and expand across more U.S. markets.
Why it matters: Base is essentially selling backup power as a subscription and underwriting the hardware with grid arbitrage revenue — a model that could undercut the $10,000+ upfront cost of a Tesla Powerwall-style system. The 5× fleet growth (100 MWh to 500 MWh) and a $13B valuation in roughly a year suggest investors see distributed home batteries as a serious grid asset, not just a consumer product.
