Company Profile · Climate · Hardware
Element Energy
The Menlo Park battery whisperer that convinced retired EV packs to take a second job - and built the largest second-life storage plant in the world while it was at it.
Out on a flat patch of West Texas, 53 megawatt-hours of batteries are doing exactly what a battery is supposed to do: they are listening to the grid, charging up when power is cheap, releasing it when ERCOT needs it. The unusual part is that none of those cells are new. They retired from electric vehicles. They were supposed to be recycled, or worse, forgotten. Instead, a small company in Menlo Park taught them a second trade.
That company is Element Energy. The plant they helped commission with LG Energy Solution Vertech in May 2024 is, as of writing, the largest second-life, grid-connected battery installation on earth. It is not a science fair. It is selling electrons. And it works because something inside each pack - a tiny mesh of semiconductors and software - is doing the kind of cell-level micromanagement that legacy battery management systems were never asked to do.
The official tally of EV batteries headed into retirement over the next decade is large enough to be alarming and large enough to be a business. Most of those packs leave the car with 70 to 80 percent of their original capacity intact. In any reasonable economy, that should be a feedstock. In practice, it has mostly been a logistics headache. Packs of different ages, different chemistries, different histories, all behaving slightly differently, none of them inclined to play in the same sandbox.
The conventional battery management system - the BMS - was not built for that mess. It was built for a uniform pack of new cells, with the conservative job of keeping everyone within voltage and temperature limits. If one cell sulked, the whole pack throttled. If a fault crept in, the BMS might catch it eventually. Eventually, when you are talking about lithium-ion, is not a comforting word.
Keep cells balanced. Stop them from overheating. Prevent thermal runaway. Predict capacity. In the legacy model, it sits in the corner like a chaperone at a school dance, hoping nothing goes wrong.
FIG. 2 · The polite fiction of the conventional battery management system.
The tension Element Energy exists to solve is that batteries are increasingly the load-bearing wall of the energy transition, and the chaperone is not enough. Fires are expensive. Premature retirements are wasteful. A 70-percent-healthy pack sent to the shredder is not green - it is an accounting error with extra steps.
In 2019, Tony Stratakos started Element Energy with Seth Kahn and Rainer Fasching. None of them came from the battery industry the way you might expect. Stratakos and Kahn came from Volterra Semiconductor, the power-electronics outfit that went public in 2004 and was later folded into Maxim. They had spent careers making silicon move power around more cleverly than anyone thought necessary. Fasching, a Stanford consulting professor with a stack of patents north of fifty, came from the chemistry side.
Their bet was unfashionably simple. The BMS, they argued, was a semiconductor problem in disguise. Treat each cell as an individually addressable node. Distribute the intelligence. Push the controls all the way down to the module level. Then write the cloud software that turns the resulting torrent of data into something a utility operator can actually trust.
It was the kind of pitch that, in 2019, looked like overkill. By 2024, after a 53 MWh plant came online, it looked more like foresight. Which is roughly the difference between being early and being wrong.
The Element Energy stack has three layers. There is the hardware - small distributed boards that sit closer to the cells than any legacy BMS would dare. There is firmware, written by people who used to bring up multi-phase regulators for a living. And there is a cloud layer that watches a pack the way an air-traffic controller watches a tower, with the same patience for excuses.
Cell-level monitoring and active control. Replaces the chaperone with something closer to a conductor.
Bankable storage built from retired EV packs. The mismatched fleet is the feature, not the bug.
New utility-scale lithium-ion sites that want more usable years from the same cells they were going to install anyway.
BMS architecture for car-makers who would prefer their packs not to make the news.
What Element Energy is really selling, when you strip away the spec sheets, is fewer surprises. A pack that does not catch fire. A pack that does not retire early. A pack that does not need to be replaced with a freshly-mined twin. The cells the company manages can be older than the company itself, which is exactly the kind of detail that ought to delight an industry that has been preaching circularity for a decade and quietly shredding most of it.
A claim is only as good as who is willing to wire money to it. The November 2023 round - $73 million of equity wrapped inside a $111 million package with $38 million in debt - was led by LG, Prelude Ventures, Radar Partners, and Edison International. Two of those names design battery cells and run utilities. They are not the kind of strategic investor that signs cheques as performance art.
The reference plant is the closer. The 53 MWh second-life project that came online in May 2024 with LG Energy Solution Vertech is not a press release dressed up as a fact - it is a commercial asset on the ERCOT grid, drawing revenue, sourced from used Honda EV packs. The kind of thing that, ten years ago, was a slide in a McKinsey deck about a circular economy. Now it is a place.
Series B · $73M equity, $111M total with debt · Nov 2023.
Lead syndicate · LG · Prelude Ventures · Radar Partners · Edison International.
Total raised · approximately $181.9M.
FIG. 4 · Money that knows where the meter is.
The stated mission - speed the adoption of clean energy by improving the safety, lifetime, and throughput of batteries - is unusually unglamorous for a climate-tech company in 2026. Nobody is promising to save the planet. They are promising to make the planet's existing inventory of cells work harder for longer. Which is, if you squint, the same thing.
There is a polite version of climate tech that sells slogans and a less polite version that sells equipment. Element Energy is squarely in the second camp. The team is large enough to ship product (around 56 people, last we checked) and small enough to still answer email. The work is split between Menlo Park and a Korean office in Sungnam-si, conveniently close to LG's center of battery gravity.
There is a downstream effect that does not get enough airtime. If retired EV batteries reliably find their way into bankable grid-scale projects, the economics of building new EV batteries change. Residual value gets re-priced. Recycling gets a competitor. Insurance gets a new actuarial case. And the people writing utility-scale RFPs in 2027 get an option that did not exist for them in 2017.
Element Energy is not the only company trying to make that future arrive. It is, at the moment, the one with the largest reference plant and the most patient investors. The combination of semiconductor pedigree and battery chemistry is rare and somewhat unfair - the kind of stacked deck that, in retrospect, will look obvious. The conventional BMS will eventually be remembered the way the dial-up modem is remembered: useful, important, and entirely surpassed.
It is still flat. It is still hot. The 53 megawatt-hours are still humming. The cells inside used to commute. Now they balance the grid. Somewhere in Menlo Park, a small board is logging another reading, and a piece of cloud software is deciding whether to balance, throttle, or hold. The chaperone is gone. The conductor is on. The battery, finally, is doing what it was always capable of - it just needed someone to ask properly.