Antora Energy raises $550M to expand thermal battery production as data center power demands surge

Antora Energy just closed a $550 million Series C round, valuing the thermal battery maker at roughly $2.47 billion. The Sunnyvale, California company plans to use the capital to scale manufacturing of modular thermal batteries designed for two of the hungriest energy consumers on the planet: heavy industry and data centers.

What Antora actually builds

Antora’s technology works by taking cheap renewable electricity, the kind that’s abundant when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and using it to heat solid carbon blocks to extreme temperatures. Those superheated blocks then release energy on demand as usable heat and power.

This matters for data centers specifically because they require uninterrupted power, the kind of always-on reliability that intermittent renewables alone can’t provide. As AI workloads push facility power requirements into unprecedented territory, thermal storage offers a path to decarbonization that doesn’t sacrifice uptime.

The money trail and what it signals

The Series C closed on July 20, 2026. The company had previously raised over $230 million in total funding, including a $150 million Series B in February 2024 that was led by Decarbonization Partners with participation from BlackRock and Temasek.

The company also received a $14.5 million SCALEUP grant from ARPA-E in 2024, which is the Department of Energy’s venture arm for high-risk, high-reward energy technologies.

Founded in 2018, Antora has moved from concept to commercial deployment in roughly eight years.

Scaling up, literally

Antora doubled the capacity of its manufacturing campus in California in April 2026, a move that set the stage for the Series C raise. A project that began commissioning in May 2026 at POET’s ethanol facility in South Dakota will feature over 200 thermal batteries totaling 5 GWh of storage capacity. When completed, it will be the largest thermal energy storage project of its kind anywhere in the world.

Target markets beyond ethanol include chemicals manufacturing, food and beverage production, and the increasingly power-hungry data center sector.

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