Antora Energy funding round brings in $550 million for thermal batteries
Antora raised a $550 million Series C to expand thermal battery deployments for data centers, industry and the grid.
By Ingrid Halvorsen · Venture Capital Reporter
· 3 min read
Antora Energy funding reached a new scale Thursday as the San Jose, California-based thermal battery startup announced a $550 million Series C, one of the larger cleantech venture rounds reported this year. G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the financing, giving Antora fresh capital to expand deployments as data centers and industrial customers look for more power.
The company did not disclose a valuation, revenue, customer count or headcount. Crunchbase says Antora has now raised $770 million since it was founded in 2017, including a $150 million Series B in February 2024.
Participants in the new round included Decarbonization Partners, the BlackRock and Temasek venture, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, John Doerr, Ribbit Capital and others. The investor list puts Antora in the group of climate infrastructure companies still able to raise late-stage capital despite a slower funding market for cleantech than during the 2021 and 2022 peak.
What does Antora Energy do?
Antora says its thermal batteries store inexpensive electricity as heat inside insulated solid carbon blocks, then provide that energy as heat or power around the clock. The company pitches the same factory-built modules for data centers, chemical plants, food producers, steelmakers and grid applications, while claiming the system avoids constrained critical minerals and long construction timelines.
The round is tied directly to demand for power from AI infrastructure. Antora said it will use the money to accelerate “large-scale” projects across the U.S. to meet rising energy needs, though it did not specify how many projects, their expected capacity, or the deployment timetable.
The company recently commissioned a 5 gigawatt-hour thermal battery system in South Dakota, which it describes as one of the world’s largest battery storage projects. Antora also says its San Jose factory is among the largest battery gigafactories in the U.S., a claim it did not quantify in the announcement.
“From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth,” Antora co-founder and CEO Andrew Ponec said in the company’s announcement. “Antora has shown we can help break that bottleneck, delivering energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation.”
Why the round stands out in cleantech
The financing lands in a cleantech market that has stabilized but remains far below the boom years. Crunchbase data shows investors put more than $15 billion into seed through growth-stage rounds for companies in cleantech, EV and sustainability-focused categories in the first half of 2026.
That pace could put 2026 slightly ahead of 2025, according to Crunchbase, but last year was the lowest total in several years and still well under the funding levels reached in 2021 and 2022. Against that backdrop, a $550 million private round signals that investors remain willing to fund capital-intensive energy hardware when the company can tie demand to data centers and industrial load.
Antora’s next test is execution. The company has raised enough capital to move beyond pilot-scale storytelling, but it did not disclose commercial terms, unit economics or the mix of customers behind its project pipeline.
This story draws on original reporting from Crunchbase News.
