Antora Energy closed a $550 million Series C funding round to expand thermal battery storage for data centers facing surging energy demand from artificial intelligence.
The company's technology stores electricity as heat in solid carbon blocks and can be deployed at scale without the supply constraints or construction timelines of traditional batteries.
With $770 million raised since 2017, Antora is positioning itself to help meet the energy bottleneck in industrial growth driven by AI infrastructure.
What happened
Antora Energy, which provides energy storage to data centers through thermal batteries, closed a $550 million Series C round led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse. The company has now raised $770 million total since 2017, including a $150 million Series B in February 2024.
Why it matters
Data centers powering AI demand need massive amounts of energy, and Antora's thermal batteries—which store low-cost electricity as heat in solid carbon blocks—offer a faster, cheaper alternative to conventional storage without supply constraints on critical minerals. The company recently deployed a 5 gigawatt-hour system in South Dakota, one of the world's largest battery storage projects.
What to watch
Antora plans to accelerate deployment of large-scale projects across the country to meet surging energy demand. The raise is among the sector's largest this year; cleantech venture funding has been modest in recent years, with first-half 2026 seeing more than $15 billion invested across seed-through growth-stage rounds.
Antora Energy announced Thursday that it closed a $550 million Series C funding round, co-led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse. The financing drew participation from a roster of high-profile investors: Decarbonization Partners (which comprises BlackRock and Temasek), Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (backed by Bill Gates), John Doerr (chairman of Kleiner Perkins), Ribbit Capital, and others. With this raise, the San Jose, California-based company has accumulated $770 million in funding since its 2017 inception. The company previously raised $150 million in a Series B round in February 2024. Antora did not disclose its valuation.
The company's core offering is thermal energy storage tailored to the power demands of data centers amid the artificial intelligence boom. Its technology stores low-cost electricity as heat inside insulated blocks of solid carbon, then delivers it continuously as heat or power. A key differentiator, according to Antora, is that the same factory-built modules can be adapted for chemical plants, food producers, steelmakers, data centers, or the power grid without facing the supply constraints of critical minerals or the multi-year construction cycles typical of conventional battery systems. The company operates what it claims is one of the country's largest battery gigafactories in San Jose.
Antora has already demonstrated the viability of large-scale deployment. The company recently completed what it describes as one of the world's largest battery storage projects—a 5 gigawatt-hour system in South Dakota. CEO Andrew Ponec stated in a release: "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." The company plans to deploy the new capital to accelerate rollout of "large-scale" projects nationwide to address mounting energy demand.
Antora's $550 million round stands out within the cleantech sector at a time when venture investment has been restrained. Crunchbase data shows that investors allocated more than $15 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for cleantech, EV, and sustainability-focused companies in the first half of 2026. Despite robust demand for energy infrastructure from AI data centers, this pace is only slightly ahead of 2025's tally—the lowest in several years—and well short of the peaks reached in 2021 and 2022. Antora's raise thus marks one of the sector's largest rounds in 2026.
Antora's $550 million Series C reflects a critical shift in how the energy infrastructure sector is responding to AI's power demands. Data centers running large language models and other AI workloads are consuming electricity at unprecedented rates, creating an urgent need for storage solutions that can be deployed quickly and at scale. Traditional battery technologies face supply bottlenecks—notably competition for materials like lithium and cobalt—and require years of construction. Antora's thermal battery approach sidesteps these constraints by using abundant solid carbon and factory-built modules, positioning the company as a solution to what CEO Andrew Ponec calls the "energy bottleneck to industrial growth." The $550 million raise, supported by major institutional investors including BlackRock and Kleiner Perkins, signals confidence that this technology can scale. The funding also arrives amid a broader softening of cleantech venture investment: despite the explosion in AI-driven energy demand, venture capital deployed into cleantech, EV, and sustainability companies in the first half of 2026 ($15+ billion across seed through growth stages) remains modest compared to 2021–2022 highs. Antora's raise is thus notable not only as a validation of thermal storage as a category but as one of the sector's largest rounds in a year when overall cleantech funding has struggled.
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