The Austin startup building a power company out of home batteries - keeping the lights on and quietly trading electricity while it does.
Base Power Company · Austin, Texas. The company's mark - a white "B" on Base green - now sits in more than a thousand Texas driveways and side yards.
Base Power is not a battery brand and not quite a traditional utility. It is trying to be both at once - and that combination is the whole story.
In February 2021, a winter storm knocked out power to millions of Texans and exposed how fragile a big, centralized grid can be. Two years later, in 2023, Zach Dell and Justin Lopas started a company premised on a different shape of the grid: not one enormous machine, but thousands of small ones sitting outside people's homes. That company is Base Power.
The pitch to a homeowner is simple. Base installs a large battery - wall-mounted at around 20 kilowatt-hours, or ground-mounted at 25 or 50 kilowatt-hours - and then sells that home its electricity at a fixed rate as a licensed Texas retail electric provider. When the grid goes down, the battery takes over and backs up the whole house, no separate critical-loads panel required. Base says the system covers roughly 97% of outages. Early customers paid thousands to install; by early 2025 Base had cut that upfront cost to the hundreds, plus a low monthly service fee.
What makes the model interesting is what happens the other 99% of the time, when the power is on. Base does not let those batteries sit idle. It aggregates them into a single fleet - a virtual power plant - and uses that fleet to buy electricity when it is cheap and sell or discharge when prices spike on the Texas ERCOT market, where wholesale prices reprice every fifteen minutes. The same battery that protects one family during a blackout is, most days, a small trading position on the grid.
Base describes its ambition plainly: to become "the modern power company of the electric era."
— Base Power, on its missionThe customer is a homeowner in a deregulated electricity market. In Texas that is a crowded field - well over a hundred retail electric providers compete for the same households - but almost none of them own the hardware in the customer's yard. Base concentrates in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas-Fort Worth, which it entered in 2025, and has begun reaching beyond Texas into markets such as Illinois. By mid-2025 it had installed more than 1,500 batteries, about 30 megawatt-hours of storage, and had sold over 100 megawatt-hours of home storage in the state.
It also sells through homebuilders. A partnership with Lennar puts Base batteries into newly built homes before the buyer moves in, and cooperative deals with Bandera Electric Cooperative and GVEC extend the model into rural utility territory.
Two problems, really. For the homeowner: outages and unpredictable bills. For the grid: peak demand. When everyone runs the air conditioning on a 105-degree afternoon, the grid strains and wholesale prices surge. A distributed fleet of home batteries can discharge into that peak instead of forcing a utility to fire up an expensive standby plant. Grid strain has only grown more acute as data centers pull record amounts of power, which is part of why investors have leaned in so hard.
The economics only make sense when you see both revenue lines coming off the same hardware.
Base installs a 20-50 kWh LFP battery at the home for a low upfront fee through its own deployment crews.
As a licensed Texas retail electric provider, Base sells the home electricity at a fixed rate plus a small monthly fee.
When the grid fails, the battery powers the whole home automatically - covering roughly 97% of outages.
Idle batteries form a virtual power plant, charging when power is cheap and discharging when ERCOT prices spike.
All batteries use lithium iron phosphate cells, an 11.4-kW inverter, and are rated for roughly a 15-year lifespan.
A compact wall-mounted system offering whole-home backup without a separate critical-loads panel.
A ground-mounted unit for larger whole-home backup and daily energy shifting.
Higher capacity for larger homes and roughly multi-day backup during extended outages.
Fixed-rate residential electricity as a Texas retail provider, bundled with the battery and a low monthly fee.
Web and mobile app for real-time charge, backup status, and energy usage - transparent, itemized billing.
An optional port to recharge the battery from a portable generator during long outages.
Installation pace has been the metric to watch - the faster batteries go in, the larger the tradable fleet becomes. Figures are approximate, drawn from public reporting.
Batteries installed per day · source: public reporting & Contrary Research
The founding team came out of hardware companies known for building things fast at scale.
Came from finance, including a stint at Thrive Capital focused on battery companies and an early internship evaluating lithium mines at Blackstone. Son of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell.
A mechanical engineer who led manufacturing on SpaceX's Falcon structures and Starbase, then headed manufacturing at defense company Anduril before co-founding Base.
Most competitors do one half of what Base does. That overlap is the point.
These sell hardware you buy and own. Base leases larger single-unit batteries at low upfront cost and controls dispatch through its own software - so the battery keeps earning after install.
Texas has 100+ retail electric providers, but they sell only electrons. Base sells electrons and owns the battery in your yard, letting it bundle backup, fixed rates, and grid services together.
The same battery that protects one family during a blackout is, most days, a small trading position on the grid.
— On the Base Power modelBase has raised more than $1.2 billion, with its Series C ranking among the largest funding rounds in the energy sector.
Backed by Thrive Capital, where CEO Zach Dell had previously worked on battery investing.
Led by Addition with Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and Valor Equity Partners. Valuation around $841M.
Led by Addition at a $4B valuation, joined by a16z, Lightspeed, Thrive, CapitalG, Ribbit, and Elad Gil.
Zach Dell and Justin Lopas launch a battery-first power company.
Base begins installing home batteries and operating as a Texas retail electric provider, reaching about one install per day.
Base cuts install costs sharply and scales to 20+ batteries installed per day; expands into Dallas-Fort Worth by August.
Base announces national expansion and a plan to build its own battery factory in Austin.
Base is reported to be in talks to raise about $1 billion at roughly triple its previous price as grid strain reshapes the market.
Interviews, coverage, and product explainers from public sources.
Base Power installs large home batteries and sells electricity to homeowners as a licensed Texas retail electric provider, offering whole-home backup plus low fixed rates while using its battery fleet to support the grid.
It was founded in 2023 in Austin, Texas by Zach Dell (CEO) and Justin Lopas (COO).
Two ways: selling electricity to customers at fixed rates plus a monthly fee, and arbitraging its aggregated home batteries on the ERCOT market by charging when power is cheap and discharging when prices spike.
Base raised a $200M Series B in April 2025 and a $1 billion Series C in October 2025 at a $4 billion valuation, and has reportedly been in talks to raise at a roughly $12 billion valuation in 2026.
Primarily in deregulated Texas markets including Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas-Fort Worth, with early expansion into other markets such as Illinois and plans to scale nationally.