A team of ex-DJI battery engineers used Kickstarter as a factory floor, turned camping gear into home power, and built a billion-dollar clean-energy company one power outage at a time.
A former commodities trader noticed homeowners were flying blind on their own electricity. So he sold them a $100 box - and started wiring 400,000 basements into a grid-scale power plant.
Base Power is an Austin-based energy company that installs large-capacity home batteries and sells electricity to homeowners as a licensed Texas retail electric provider. Founded in 2023 by Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, it pairs whole-home backup with low fixed rates, using its growing fleet of distributed batteries as a virtual power plant that charges when power is cheap and discharges when the grid is strained. The company raised a $1 billion Series C in October 2025 at a $4 billion valuation and is building its own battery factory in Austin to scale nationally.