Battery Storage Startup Antora Closes $550M Series C In One Of Year’s Largest Cleantech Rounds
Amid soaring energy demand from AI data centers, Antora says it will use its new capital to speed up deployment of “large-scale” projects across the country.
Battery storage startup Antora Energy has successfully closed a $550 million Series C funding round, marking one of the year's most significant cleantech investment rounds. Co-led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse, the financing round also saw participation from Decarbonization Partners (BlackRock/Temasek), Lowercarbon Capital, Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins), Ribbit Capital, and others.
Since its inception in 2017, Antora has raised a total of $770 million, with the latest round bringing the company's total funding to that amount.
Antora, based in San Jose, California, specializes in providing energy to data centers through thermal batteries. These batteries store low-cost electricity as heat in insulated blocks of solid carbon, which can then be delivered around the clock as heat or power. The company's unique technology allows its factory-built modules to serve various industries, including chemical plants, food producers, steelmakers, data centers, and the grid, without relying on critical minerals or facing multi-year construction timelines. This results in cost-effective, clean energy that can be deployed rapidly.
With the surge in data center demand fueled by the artificial intelligence revolution, Antora plans to utilize its new capital to expedite the deployment of large-scale projects across the country. The company recently completed a 5 gigawatt-hour battery storage project in South Dakota, showcasing the effectiveness of its technology.
Antora's co-founder and CEO, Andrew Ponec, emphasized the company's role in breaking the bottleneck that energy poses to industrial growth, stating that their factories are among the largest in the country and their approach delivers energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation. Despite a relatively modest increase in cleantech venture investment in recent years, Antora's latest funding round is one of the largest in the sector this year.
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