After plugging into Dallas–Fort Worth last year, Austin-based Base Power has raised $1 billion in Series C funding to expand nationally and scale up its domestic manufacturing.

The energy startup—co-founded in 2023 by CEO Zach Dell and COO Justin Lopas—offers fixed-rate home electric plans with whole-home battery backup. Backed by venture capital, Base aims to reimagine the power grid through distributed storage that delivers both affordability and reliability.

The company began serving the DFW region in 2024 and expanded into Dallas proper this past August. With a new office and warehouse in Grapevine, its North Texas footprint now includes Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, and Irving.

Base says it’s working to lower electric costs for homeowners while proving how distributed battery systems can operate at utility scale.

“The chance to reinvent our power system comes once in a generation,” CEO Zach Dell said in a statement announcing the funding round. 

The new funding, one of the largest Series C rounds of the year, was led by Addition. New investors include CapitalG, Spark, BOND, Lowercarbon, and Ribbit, with continued support from existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Lightspeed. The round brings Base’s total funding to $1.3 billion, according to Crunchbase. Earlier this year, the company raised $200 million in its Series B funding round.

With the capital in place, the company plans to expand beyond its current Texas markets, including DFW, Houston, and Austin.

“We’re scaling the team to make our abundant energy future a reality,” Dell said in the announcement. He added that meeting the challenge “requires the best engineers and operators to solve it.”

Base Power battery connected to a home. [Photo: Base]

A battery in every home, but no solar required

Base’s model is designed for reliability and resilience. It offers a fixed-rate energy plan that includes installation of a whole-home backup battery, even if the home doesn’t have solar panels. The company owns and maintains the battery, which kicks in automatically during outages to provide up to 24 hours of backup depending on usage.

The company recently qualified for Texas’s Aggregated Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) program, allowing it to pool capacity from individual home batteries and bid it into the market. Base said the ability to participate in this program “strengthens reliability statewide and generates additional revenue from the grid.”

From print plant to power plant

To meet growing demand and support operations, Base said it is building its first factory in downtown Austin by repurposing the former Austin American-Statesman newspaper press facility. The site will manufacture energy storage systems and power electronics.

“The only way to add capacity to the grid is physically deploying hardware,” said COO and co-founder Justin Lopas. “We need to make that here in the U.S., ourselves.”

While the factory in Austin is the company’s first, Lopas said, Base is already planning for its second. “We’re building the infrastructure, systems, tools, processes, supporting software, and team that’s reindustrializing America and reinventing the grid,” he added.

Since launching, Base reports it has deployed over 100 megawatt-hours of residential battery capacity, making it one of the fastest-scaling distributed energy platforms in the U.S. The company said that its growth is driven by organic demand, utility partnerships, and relationships with national homebuilders like Lennar.

Dell, whose father founded Dell Technologies, has emphasized the urgency of Base’s mission. “The pain every Texan feels in the summer and the winter is a preview of what may come nationwide,” he said in August. “Base Power is the key to unlocking an energy-abundant future through dispatchable, distributed battery storage.”

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