“From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth,” Andrew Ponec, co-founder and CEO of Antora, said in a news release. “Antora has shown we can help break that bottleneck — delivering energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation.”
The company launched its first pilot project in 2023: a 5-megawatt-hour system installed at a facility owned by the utility Wellhead Electric near Fresno, California. Months later, Antora raised $150 million from corporate and venture investors to scale up thermal-battery production at the San Jose factory, which it has expanded into a three-building manufacturing campus.
Antora built over 200 battery modules for the South Dakota storage system. But the project is notable for more than its technology. Antora is also pioneering an electricity tariff, designed with the local utility Otter Tail Power, that rewards Antora for charging up during periods of surplus local renewable energy production. The idea is to improve the bottom line for thermal energy systems while also ensuring they benefit everyone on the grid. Antora said it’s working with utilities across the country to develop similar rate structures for future projects.
With the $550 million fundraise, Antora said it plans to build a second U.S. manufacturing hub and to start fulfilling its “growing pipeline of signed agreements” with some of the nation’s biggest data center operators and industrial companies, including biofuels and chemical producers and food and beverage manufacturers. The company declined to share more specific details.
“We’re in the process of developing many more projects, very similar to the Big Stone project [with Poet], and those projects span a variety of sectors and are sort of a similar size,” Justin Briggs, Antora’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told Canary Media in a May interview.
“We’re also developing projects in the power sector that would provide the ability for data centers to come online much faster than they otherwise would,” he said, noting that those systems could be anywhere from five to 10 times the scale of its 5-GWh system at the South Dakota ethanol plant.
“Our energy system is at an inflection point, and very few companies can meet soaring power demand,” Jake Tauscher, partner at G2 Venture Partners, said in the news release. “Antora is meeting that demand today. They’re deploying at scale, on budget, and on the rapid timelines customers need.”
