Antora Energy, a maker of thermal batteries for industrial sites and data centres, said on 30 July 2026 that it had closed an oversubscribed $550m Series C round. G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the round.
New investors were Ribbit Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Activate Capital, John Doerr, Westly Group, StepStone Group and Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures. Existing investors Decarbonization Partners, Impact Science Ventures, Trust Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital also took part.
Antora did not disclose a valuation or the total it has raised to date.
“From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth. Antora has shown we can help break that bottleneck—delivering energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation.”Andrew Ponec, Co-Founder and CEO, Antora
What Antora does
Antora's batteries take in low-cost electricity and store it as heat in insulated blocks of solid carbon. The stored energy can later be released either as heat for industrial processes or as electricity. The company says its systems can hold energy for several days and do not depend on critical minerals that are in short supply.
Its largest project to date is a 50 MW, 5 GWh installation at POET's bioprocessing plant in Big Stone City, South Dakota, where more than 200 of its thermal batteries were deployed, according to ESS News. The project went from the start of construction to commissioning in under 12 months.
The batteries are built at Antora's factory in San Jose, California, which the company has expanded into a three-building campus. ESS News reported that two new facilities added in spring 2026 doubled its manufacturing capacity.
What the money is for
Antora said it would use the funding to speed up large-scale deployments, expand production, set up a second US manufacturing hub and strengthen its domestic supply chain. The company said it is applying the approach used in South Dakota to a growing pipeline of signed agreements with hyperscale data centre operators and industrial companies, though it did not name them.
Co-founder and chief executive Andrew Ponec said in the announcement that the round would continue the company's investment in US manufacturing. Nehali Jain, vice president of strategy and growth, said the financing would let Antora deploy more projects, more quickly, across more sectors and regions.
Who invested
Joe Fath, partner and head of growth at Eclipse, said Antora had moved beyond proving its technology and was now showing it could manufacture and deploy at speed and scale. Jake Tauscher, a partner at G2 Venture Partners, said the energy system was at an inflection point and that few companies could meet rising power demand.
John Doerr was listed among the new investors in his own name. Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital were among the existing shareholders that put in more money.
The funding so far
Antora's previous round was a $150m Series B in 2024, led by Decarbonization Partners, a partnership between BlackRock and Temasek, according to Mercom Capital Group. Emerson Collective, GS Futures, The Nature Conservancy and a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources also took part in that round.
In its report on the round, Mercom noted that energy storage companies raised $1.6bn across 51 deals in the first half of 2026, down 6% from $1.7bn across 36 deals a year earlier.
Company website: antoraenergy.com