Antora Energy funding round brings in $550 million for thermal batteries
Antora Energy raised a $550 million Series C to expand thermal battery projects as AI data centers push up electricity demand.
By Theo Nakamura · Staff Writer
· 3 min read
Antora Energy funding reached $550 million in a new Series C round, putting another spotlight on the power problem behind the AI buildout. For everyday investors watching chips, cloud companies and data centers, the deal shows how electricity supply is becoming part of the same growth story.
The San Jose, California-based company said Thursday that G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the financing. Participants included Decarbonization Partners, the BlackRock and Temasek venture, Lowercarbon Capital, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, John Doerr, Ribbit Capital and other backers.
A Series C is a later-stage startup funding round, usually used by companies that have moved beyond early product development and need capital to scale. Antora did not disclose its valuation.
Crunchbase said Antora has now raised $770 million since it was founded in 2017. The company previously raised $150 million in a Series B round in February 2024.
What does Antora Energy do?
Antora makes thermal batteries, which store electricity as heat rather than as chemical energy in a traditional battery. The company says its system uses low-cost electricity to heat insulated blocks of solid carbon, then delivers that stored energy as heat or power around the clock.
That matters because many industrial sites need steady energy, not only electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Antora says the same factory-built modules can serve data centers, chemical plants, food producers, steelmakers or the grid.
The company said it will use the new money to speed deployment of large projects across the United States to meet rising energy demand. Antora tied that demand in part to the growth of AI data centers, which need large and reliable power supplies to run servers continuously.
Antora recently commissioned what it described as one of the world’s largest battery storage projects, a 5 gigawatt-hour thermal battery system in South Dakota. A gigawatt-hour is a measure of stored energy, and larger figures generally mean a system can supply more power, for longer, depending on how it is used.
Antora also says its approach avoids supply-constrained critical minerals and long construction schedules associated with some energy projects. The company claims its San Jose factory is among the largest battery gigafactories in the U.S.
Andrew Ponec, Antora’s co-founder and CEO, said in the company’s release that energy has become a constraint on industrial growth, from factories to data centers. He said Antora has demonstrated that it can deliver energy quickly and at scale using U.S. technology.
Why is this cleantech round getting attention?
The round stands out because cleantech venture funding has been more restrained in recent years, even as AI-related electricity demand has intensified. Crunchbase described Antora’s financing as one of the largest cleantech rounds of the year.
Crunchbase data shows investors put more than $15 billion into seed through growth-stage rounds for startups in its cleantech, electric vehicle and sustainability categories during the first half of 2026. That pace would slightly top the 2025 total, according to Crunchbase, although last year was the weakest in several years and far below the funding peaks reached in 2021 and 2022.
For public-market investors, Antora remains a private company, so the round is not a direct stock-market event. It is still a useful signal: AI infrastructure spending is extending beyond semiconductors and software into the physical systems needed to power more computing capacity.
This story draws on original reporting from Crunchbase News.
