I was 9 months pregnant in December when a big storm hit Northern California and took down the power at my house for 4 days. My husband and I traded off charging our phones with the car battery so we could sit on hold with PG&E to find out when crews would be able to repair the damage. I called so many times that they began answering the phone by saying, “Yes, we know you are about to have a baby.” Fortunately, our lights were back on before I was home from the hospital, but the situation left me personally confronted with the instability of our aging electric grid.
Because the reality is that our grid wasn’t built for the 21st century. Electricity demand is surging for residential and commercial use, grid volatility and outages are rising, and interconnection queues are longer than ever. Especially as AI adoption gains momentum, consumers electrify their lives, and manufacturing moves back to the United States, the grid — the largest machine ever constructed — cannot keep pace.
We believe the team at Base Power is building the new grid that can meet this moment.
Batteries are just the beginning
Base installs residential and commercial-scale batteries that lower energy bills, provide backup power, and give customers greater control over their energy. It’s straightforward on the surface but, behind the scenes, each battery is a node in a rapidly scaling virtual power plant.
As they scale, this distributed network isn’t just residential backup power. It becomes a flexible buffer for the entire grid that can absorb volatility, respond to real-time signals, and step in when centralized infrastructure falls short. As the network grows, Base is becoming what the U.S. grid desperately needs: a bottom-up utility that complements, stabilizes, and ultimately redefines the legacy, top-down system.
By delivering flexibility at the load source, Base offers meaningful value on both sides of the meter — helping homeowners reduce peak usage and keep the lights on, while enabling grid operators to avoid peaker plants and defer costly transmission upgrades built for long-tail events. The result is lower electricity prices and fewer outages.
Built by builders
However, transforming the grid requires more than a grand vision. The grid is big and complex. It starts and ends in people’s homes, and in the middle it carries the entire US economy on its back. Making an impact here is a true execution challenge.
Base has built a high-throughput, software-driven deployment engine in one of the slowest-moving sectors of the economy — from recruiting and training electricians, to building a battery assembly line, to navigating local permitting and utility red tape. Think of it less like a battery company, and more like a full-stack power installation factory: permit, design, install, repeat.
It’s one thing to design a product. It’s another to install thousands of systems in just a few months, across dozens of zip codes, without compromising speed or quality.
But that’s exactly what the team, led by Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, has done. They’ve assembled a group of engineers, operators, and energy experts from Tesla, SpaceX, Anduril, and beyond — people who thrive on solving hard problems with real-world consequences. It’s the kind of team we want to back, and the kind of company that moves the needle.
And today, we’re proud to announce our investment in Base Power’s Series B. Base isn’t just a bet on batteries — it’s a bet on reimagining how energy is stored, delivered, and orchestrated. It’s a bet on a software-native utility, purpose-built for a new kind of grid. And most of all, it’s a bet on a team radically reshaping the future of decentralized energy. If you want to be part of it, Base Power is hiring.
