Zach Dell’s Base Reaches $13 Billion Valuation in $1 Billion Funding Round

Home energy battery startup Base has raised $1 billion in a Series D funding round, propelling its valuation to $13 billion less than a year after being valued at $4 billion.

The financing was co-led by Ribbit Capital, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorgan Chase’s Strategic Investment Group. Existing investors including Thrive Capital, a16z, Lightspeed, Trust Ventures, and CapitalG also participated in the round, reinvesting in the Austin, Texas-based enterprise founded in 2023 by Zach Dell.

Instead of relying on hardware retail markups standard in residential battery sales, Base operates as an infrastructure utility. The company generates revenue by taking equity in retail power markets and trading energy on wholesale grids—charging installed battery units during low-cost off-peak hours and supplying stored energy back into regional grids when wholesale electricity prices peak.

“Our business model, which is very unique, is that we’re really an infrastructure company,” Dell said. “We own and operate the assets in the wholesale power markets. That’s really where we make our money, not by trying to sell the consumer something at a really high-margin upfront cost.”

To support its scaling velocity, Base opened Base Factory 1 in Austin earlier this year to manufacture proprietary 39.2 kilowatt-hour battery storage units designed for high-capacity grid integration, replacing third-party systems. Construction is underway on a significantly larger second facility scheduled for completion in 2027.

“This battery is designed to be a grid resource,” Dell said. “It’s bigger, it installs faster, it switches over cleaner, it’s more powerful, it has more duration.”

Base has expanded its deployment pace from single daily installations to over 100 systems per day, building a customer base exceeding 30,000 homes. Consumers access the power storage systems via an installation fee capped at $695 alongside a $19 monthly membership fee, avoiding traditional upfront equipment purchases that often exceed $15,000 for home generators or alternative storage solutions. Customers retain backup power during localized outages lasting up to two to three days.

“We’re charging the batteries when prices on the grid are low, and we’re discharging the batteries with demand when prices on the grid or high,” Dell said.

Having initially targeted the Texas electricity market, Base recently expanded into Illinois, offering promotional installation rates of $95 to accelerate adoption in new service areas. “We’ll likely experiment with pricing based on market signals as we enter different markets,” Dell said.

The enterprise is positioning itself to capture market share within the $200 billion U.S. residential retail electricity industry, planning further expansion into additional states through deregulated markets and monopoly utility partnerships.

“We want to bring Base to every neighborhood in America over time,” Dell said. “The scale of the opportunity is just massive and, of course, we do have global ambitions. We think markets like the U.K., Germany, Australia, and potentially others are attractive as well.”

The capital injection arrives as rapidly increasing power demand driven by data center development and artificial intelligence infrastructure puts sustained pressure on electrical grid capacity nationwide.

“All the investors are really long-term oriented thinkers, given the size of the opportunity and the time it will take to kind of execute into it,” Dell said. “We’ve made a lot of progress but, in the grand scheme of things, we’re really just getting started.”

Base offers residential setups in single or dual-battery configurations. “Most people actually want two, but not everyone has room on the side of their house for two,” Dell said.

Dell, who turns 30 later this month, operates Base independently of his father, Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, who serves as a mentor to the enterprise.