The numbers come first. Base Power, the home battery company co-founded by Zach Dell in 2023, has closed a $1 billion Series D funding round that pushed its valuation from $4 billion to $13 billion in less than a year. Dell turns 30 later this month.
The round was co-led by Ribbit Capital, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JP Morgan Chase's Strategic Investment Group. Existing investors — including Thrive Capital, a16z, Lightspeed, CapitalG, and others — also re-invested. 'All the investors are really long-term oriented thinkers, given the size of the opportunity and the time it will take to kind of execute into it,' Dell told Fortune.
Base has scaled from one battery installation per day to more than 100 per day, serving over 30,000 customers. The Austin-based company launched its own manufacturing facility, Base Factory 1, in Austin, Texas earlier this year. A second, larger factory is under construction and slated for completion in 2027. Base currently operates in Texas and Illinois, with additional state expansions planned for next year.
The business model is built on infrastructure, not hardware margins. Rather than charging homeowners $15,000 or more for a backup power system, Base collects an installation fee capped at $695 — as low as $95 in Illinois for new market penetration — and a flat monthly membership of $19. The company owns and operates the battery assets, then participates in wholesale power markets by charging batteries when grid prices are low and discharging when prices are high.
'Our business model, which is very unique, is that we're really an infrastructure company,' Dell said. 'We own and operate the assets in the wholesale power markets. That's really where we make our money, not by trying to sell the consumer something at a really high-margin upfront cost.'
Base's proprietary battery stores 39.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity — significantly more than most competitors, according to Dell. The system is designed as a grid resource, not a garage EV charger. It offers one or two-battery configurations; a single battery provides backup power for outages of up to two to three days.
The residential retail electricity market in the United States is approximately $200 billion, Dell noted. He cited the U.K., Germany, and Australia as international expansion targets. 'We want to bring Base to every neighborhood in America over time,' he said.
Michael Dell, currently the fifth-wealthiest person in the world according to Fortune, is not involved in Base but serves as a mentor to his son.
CEO Times take: This is free enterprise working exactly as advertised. A 29-year-old founder identified a real infrastructure problem — strained grids, expensive backup power, volatile retail electricity — and built a capital-efficient solution without waiting for a federal program to validate it. The $13 billion market verdict reflects what investors already know: when a business model lowers costs for the consumer while generating returns from wholesale markets, it does not need a mandate to grow. Base Factory 1 is in Austin. The capital is private. The customer pays $19 a month. Washington did not build this.
