Antora raises $150 million to boost manufacturing

Thermal battery maker Antora Energy has raised $150 million in Series B funding, the company said today. The financing round — led by Decarbonization Partners, a fund sponsored by BlackRock and Temasek — will help the California-based startup ramp up domestic battery production at its factory in San Jose.

• The top line: Antora is all-in on manufacturing in the United States, and is aiming to scale up to get batteries out to industrial customers in its pipeline. Its strategy involves partnerships that operate similarly to power purchase agreements — a model that it hopes will ultimately wean plants off of natural gas without the immense wait times often posed by interconnection queues.
• The market grounding: Decarbonizing industrial manufacturing has been a prickly challenge, in large part due to a dearth of cost-effective methods of storing renewable energy at an industrial scale. Thermal industrial batteries, like those made by Antora and competitors Rondo and Caldera, can deliver heat between 1,500 and 1,700 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to meet more than 90% of the industrial heat demand that is today supplied by fossil fuels. However, the technology has faced barriers to scale, including ill-equipped traditional electricity rate structures, and a lack of access to wholesale power markets.
• The current take: “This is the first time where renewable sources of electricity can compete head to head with the combustion of fossil fuels,” said Antora co-founder and CCO David Bierman. “The raise is strong validation and recognition that thermal batteries are the most credible, the most scalable, and the fastest path to decarbonization.”

Antora’s approach to thermal batteries uses blocks of solid carbon, heated to red-hot temperatures in an insulated module. One of the biggest drivers of the company's current success, and of interest from major financial backers, is a concurrence of macroeconomic trends that make the company’s offering really pencil out with a plant’s economics, Bierman told Latitude Media.

“We’re providing a decarbonization pathway that has a net operating benefit,” he said. “It’s good for their bottom line, versus a lot of the alternatives that they’re facing.”

An area of particular promise for thermal industrial batteries, Bierman said, is behind-the-meter renewables — “the ability to take an industrial plant off of natural gas without having to wait eight years to get connected.”

Since closing its Series A in 2022, the company has launched its commercial-scale thermal battery product aimed at sectors like cement and steel, and opened a manufacturing facility to produce modules for a handful of Antora’s first major commercial projects. This latest round of funding, which brings Antora’s total to over $230 million, will help the company scale manufacturing, ramp up shipping to customer sites (primarily in the Midwest), and build out its California team.

The company’s heat-as-a-service business model hinges on installing its batteries directly at industrial sites, and then selling heat and power on demand. Antora’s financial partners are helping to foot the cost of getting those systems installed, up, and running.

Antora competitor Rondo offers similarly-structured “heat as a service” agreements. Both companies also offer capital purchases for customers to purchase heat batteries for their facilities, but the former is the business model Bierman expects to be most widely-deployed as the still-nascent thermal battery industry grows. That's in large part, he said, because there’s no capital expenditures for industrial customers, making it a very straightforward way for them to decarbonize.

With that model, industrial customers can remain above the fray of interconnection queues and transmission woes, Bierman said: “When we’re doing our job right, the customer is never thinking about any of those challenges.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on February 22 to clarify that Antora also offers the option of selling batteries directly to customers.