Heron Power, a Scotts Valley, California company founded by former Tesla executive Drew Baglino, announced on 18 February 2026 that it had raised $140m in a Series B round to build solid-state transformers at scale.
Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism Fund and Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the round. Capricorn Investment Group, Energy Impact Partners, Gigascale Capital and Valor Atreides AI Fund also took part. SiliconANGLE put the company's total funding at about $178m. No valuation was reported.
TechCrunch noted the speed of the follow-on: Heron raised a $38m Series A in May 2025. Baglino told TechCrunch the company did not need the money, but decided to raise again after customers said they wanted to buy more than 40 gigawatts of the transformers.
“Too much of today’s electrical infrastructure is passive, clunky equipment designed decades ago”Drew Baglino, CEO, Heron Power
What Heron Power makes
Heron's product, Heron Link, is a solid-state transformer. Instead of the iron-core transformers that have been used in much the same form for more than a century, it uses power electronics to convert and regulate voltage between medium- and low-voltage systems, SiliconANGLE reported. The design allows power to flow in both directions and is meant for solar farms, battery storage and data centres.
TechCrunch said the units can convert medium-voltage electricity to the 800-volt power used in Nvidia's reference rack designs and handle 5 megawatts each. Each contains tens of modules, and a failed module can be swapped in about 10 minutes. Baglino said the approach can remove about 70% of the equipment involved in some setups.
SiliconANGLE added that a software layer manages the hardware and handles interconnection between generation, storage and end-use loads, including voltage transformation and frequency management. It lets operators monitor performance and adjust settings, and it interfaces with grid control systems, so the units can fit into utility workflows and existing substations.
Data centres make up about a third of the business at present, Baglino told TechCrunch. The rest is split between solar power and grid-scale batteries.
The factory plan
The money will pay for a highly automated factory in the United States able to produce 40 gigawatts of Heron Link transformers a year. TechCrunch calculated that as about 10% to 15% of annual production outside China.
Baglino said the company intends to start pilot production in early 2027 and then ramp over the following two years. Santa Cruz Works, a local business group, noted that a production build-up of that size could bring manufacturing and engineering jobs to the Scotts Valley area, though the company has not said how many people it will hire.
Founder and market
Baglino spent nearly two decades at Tesla and led its powertrain and energy groups, according to TechCrunch. SiliconANGLE said Heron was founded in 2024.
Erin Price-Wright, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said the company is building technology to bring the ageing grid into a software-defined, AI-native era and is manufacturing it in America. TechCrunch observed that Heron is not alone in solid-state transformers and that competition will be stiff because many of the grid's old transformers are nearing replacement age.
In the announcement, Baglino said modern power electronics can let projects come online faster, make the grid more reliable and help it scale affordably. SiliconANGLE described the target customers as utility-scale solar developers, battery storage operators and hyperscale data centre builders, which often face long waits for grid connections because of transformer shortages.