en.Wedoany.com Reported - Antora Energy announced on July 30 that it has completed a $550 million Series C funding round, which was oversubscribed, with proceeds to advance the deployment of its thermal battery energy storage systems at industrial facilities and data centers across the United States.
The round was co-led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse, with new investors including 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 participated in the round.
Antora said the funds will support the company in advancing large-scale project deployments nationwide, expanding manufacturing capacity, establishing a second U.S. manufacturing hub, and strengthening the domestic supply chain.
Prior to the funding announcement, Antora had completed deployment of the 5GWh Big Stone project in South Dakota, delivering energy in less than 12 months from project start to commissioning. The company has also signed a long-term thermal offtake agreement with POET Bioprocessing for this project.
Antora's thermal batteries store heat in solid carbon blocks at temperatures up to 2,400°C. When charging, the system resistively heats the carbon blocks with electricity, and the high thermal conductivity of carbon enables rapid charging; energy can be stored in the battery for several days to match continuous industrial demand. The company's developed thermophotovoltaic (TPV) technology can convert light emitted by heated carbon blocks into electricity.
This technology enables factories and processing plants to purchase electricity during off-peak pricing periods or charge using on-site renewable energy, reducing both operating costs and greenhouse gas emissions from industrial heating and cooling processes.
Andrew Ponec, co-founder and CEO of Antora, said the company is addressing the energy bottleneck constraining industrial growth. He stated that Antora has proven it can help break this bottleneck by supplying energy at scale and speed through American innovation.
Antora's facility in San Jose, California, has been expanded into a manufacturing campus consisting of three buildings, with employees including welders, electricians, pipefitters, and machinists. According to the company, its deployment efforts have created and supported hundreds of manufacturing and construction jobs.
The funding round arrives as data centers and industrial facilities face increasing difficulty securing reliable power on tighter timelines. Antora's pipeline of agreements with hyperscale data center operators and industrial customers is growing, though specific customer names and project details were not disclosed.
Thermal energy storage currently still holds a relatively small share of the overall energy storage market. In May, MGA Thermal and Knode launched a front-end engineering design (FEED) study for a 195MWh electric thermal energy storage project at Tronox's Kwinana facility in Western Australia. Under a "heat-as-a-service" agreement, the system will supply approximately 20 tons of renewable steam per hour to Tronox, a global chemicals and mining company.
