US energy storage company Antora Energy has raised $550 million in Series C funding to accelerate deployment of its thermal battery technology for industrial customers, data centres and the electricity grid.
The funding announcement follows the company’s recent commissioning of a 5 GWh battery storage project in South Dakota, which Antora said moved from initial construction to energy delivery in less than 12 months.
The funding round was co-led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse, with participation from investors including Ribbit Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Activate Capital, John Doerr, Westly Group, StepStone Group and Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures. Existing backers, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Decarbonization Partners and LowercarbonCapital, also invested.
Antora will use the capital to expand manufacturing capacity, establish a second US production hub and strengthen its domestic supply chain.
Rising electricity demand from AI data centres and industrial expansion is creating pressure for faster and more flexible energy infrastructure. Antora believes its thermal battery systems can help provide large-scale energy without relying on constrained critical minerals or lengthy power infrastructure projects.
The company’s technology stores electricity as heat inside insulated solid carbon blocks and converts it back into usable heat or power when required. The modular systems are designed for applications ranging from steel and chemical production to food manufacturing, data centres and grid services.
“From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth,” said Andrew Ponec, Antora’s co-founder and CEO. “Antora has shown we can help break that bottleneck—delivering energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation.”
The company said its batteries can charge when electricity is cheaper or more abundant and discharge when demand increases, helping operators manage energy costs while supporting grid reliability.
Joe Fath, Partner and Head of Growth at Eclipse, said the company had moved beyond early technology demonstration.
“Antora has moved beyond proving the technology to demonstrating it can manufacture and deploy at remarkable speed and scale,” he said.
Antora’s San Jose, California manufacturing site has expanded into a three-building battery production campus, which the company describes as one of the largest battery factories in the US. Unlike conventional lithium-ion systems, its thermal batteries use abundant materials and are designed for multi-day energy storage.
As AI-driven electricity demand continues to reshape energy markets, Antora’s funding round reflects growing investor interest in storage technologies designed to provide reliable power at industrial scale.
