A company that installs batteries in people's garages for a few hundred dollars down is now worth thirteen billion dollars. It got there in less than two years.
Most home batteries cost more than ten thousand dollars upfront. Base Power charges somewhere between ninety five and six hundred ninety five dollars, depending on location, then signs you up as its electricity customer for at least three years.
The company owns the battery, not the homeowner. Base makes its money the way any retail electricity provider does, buying power when it's cheap and selling it when it's not, except now it has a battery parked in your garage to help with the timing. It's a fundamentally different bet than a typical solar installer makes, closer to a utility that happens to store its inventory on your property, a framing The Wall Street Journal has used to describe the company.
In April 2025, Base Power raised two hundred million dollars. Six months later, it raised a billion. Ten months after that, it raised another billion, at a valuation that had jumped from four billion to thirteen billion dollars.
The most recent round was led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group, following earlier backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Founder and CEO Zach Dell, son of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, has described the early financial returns simply. The math is indeed mathing, he said, after the second billion dollar round closed.
Base Power now manufactures its own batteries inside the old Austin American-Statesman newspaper building, a 39.2 kilowatt-hour unit big enough to run a house through a multi-day outage.
Building its own hardware domestically was a deliberate shift. Base had previously relied on an overseas, non-China supplier building batteries to its specifications. Manufacturing in-house means finished units can go straight from the line onto a delivery truck instead of waiting on an ocean crossing. The company has also floated plans for a second, far larger Austin-area factory, roughly 486,000 square feet and a 265 million dollar investment tied to 500 new jobs, though talks with the city over an incentive package fell apart, and no revised budget or opening date has been made public since.
The old Austin American-Statesman newspaper building now houses Base Power's battery assembly line.
Base Power's entire business model depends on something most states don't have. In Texas, homeowners can choose their own electricity retailer, which is exactly the role Base plays once it installs your battery.
That deregulated structure, unique to most of Texas's ERCOT grid, is what lets a single company be your battery installer and your power company at the same time. Expanding outside Texas means navigating a patchwork of state utility regulation instead. Base has already cleared one such hurdle, winning authorization from the Illinois Commerce Commission to operate there, an early sign the company thinks its model can travel beyond the one grid built to allow it.
Base isn't just selling to homeowners one at a time anymore. It's building a 100 megawatt network of home batteries under contract with an electric cooperative outside Dallas-Fort Worth, treating thousands of individual garages as a single power plant a utility can actually rely on.
That's the real test of the company's pitch. Plenty of startups have promised that small, distributed batteries can be coordinated into something that behaves like a traditional power plant. Few have had to prove it under an actual utility contract, where performance is measured against the same expectations utilities have for a gas plant, not against a homeowner's expectations for a backup generator.
Batteries are genuinely good at smoothing out short, predictable summer demand spikes. They're a much harder answer for a prolonged, multi-day crisis, the exact kind of event that once brought the Texas grid to its knees.
Grid analysts who study ERCOT have pointed out that battery fleets are highly effective for the few tight hours around sunset on a hot day, but far less useful across the kind of extended, days-long freeze that caused Winter Storm Uri's deadly blackouts, since a battery that's already discharged has nothing left to give until it's recharged. Base Power has never had to prove its fleet can hold up through a crisis on that scale. Its garages, its factory, and its thirteen billion dollar valuation have all been built during comparatively ordinary weather.