Antora Energy has raised $550M in a Series C round, one of the largest cleantech deals of the year, to speed deployment of its thermal batteries as AI data centers strain power grids.
G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the financing. BlackRock and Temasek’s Decarbonization Partners, Lowercarbon Capital, Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, John Doerr and Ribbit Capital also participated.
The San Jose startup has now raised $770M since its founding in 2017. It did not disclose a valuation.
Antora’s technology stores low-cost electricity as heat inside insulated blocks of solid carbon, then delivers it around the clock as heat or power. The company says the same factory-built modules can serve a chemical plant, a steelmaker or a data center, without supply-constrained critical minerals or multi-year construction timelines.
It recently switched on what it calls one of the world’s largest battery storage projects, a 5 gigawatt-hour system in South Dakota, and claims its San Jose factory ranks among the country’s biggest battery gigafactories.
“From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth,” co-founder and CEO Andrew Ponec said.
The raise stands out in a cautious cleantech market: investors put just over $15B into seed through growth-stage cleantech deals in the first half of 2026, per Crunchbase data, on pace to slightly beat last year’s multi-year low.
