Antora Energy builds thermal batteries that store electricity as heat in solid carbon blocks — delivering affordable, reliable, around-the-clock power to data centers, factories, and the grid without supply chain constraints. Salesforce Ventures is proud to join Antora’s Series C as they scale to deliver firm, dispatchable power for the AI era.
Founders: Andrew Ponec, Justin Briggs, and David Bierman
Location: San Jose, CA
Industry: Energy
The Opportunity
It’s understood that the world’s power grid can’t keep up with demand. Data centers are the most visible driver: U.S. data center electricity needs are on track to nearly triple by 2035, and two-thirds of new hyperscale campuses are being built in regions where the grid is already constrained. However, AI is far from the only driver. Heavy industry, electric transport, and reshoring manufacturing are all adding load at the same time, and new gas plants and grid interconnections routinely take 5-7 years to come online. In short, growing demand across AI infrastructure, industry, and transportation is bottlenecked by a lack of reliable, around-the-clock power.
Industrial operators face a further problem. Factories, refineries, and biofuel plants that need heat 24/7 have long depended on natural gas, which is cheap and reliable but leaves them exposed to volatile fuel prices and emissions. That reliability assumption is also increasingly fragile. Supply disruptions have become a recurring reality, and geopolitical shocks have accelerated this pressure.
The Solution
Antora Energy builds thermal batteries that store low-cost, intermittent electricity as heat in solid carbon blocks that are heated to more than 2,000°C. The batteries release that energy around the clock, which is delivered either as steam for industrial processes or as electricity for the grid and data centers. The result: affordable, reliable, firm energy that deploys fast, at any scale.
Carbon is the fourth-most-produced industrial material on Earth, roughly a tenth the cost of lithium-ion battery materials, and holds about four times as much energy in the same space. That combination of cheap, abundant, domestically available material paired with factory-built modules lets Antora manufacture at scale without relying on the mined-mineral supply chains that constrain lithium-ion batteries. Antora’s San Jose, California gigafactory is among the largest battery factories in the country. The batteries from that factory are already going into massive projects across the country — giving data centers, factories, and the grid a completely new tool to rapidly deliver reliable, cost-effective energy at any scale.
Antora’s first giga-scale deployment, Project Big Stone in South Dakota, is one of the largest batteries in the world. The 5GWh system went from an empty lot to delivering 24/7 energy to ethanol producer POET in under a year. That project demonstrates Antora’s ability to deploy at rapid speed and massive scale, and gives Antora something rare among pioneering energy technologies: a proven, operating asset and contracted long-term revenue.
Why We’re Backing Antora
Antora was founded in 2018 by Andrew Ponec (CEO), Justin Briggs (COO), and David Bierman (CCO), who met as part of the Activate Fellowship. Ponec built and sold a power electronics company to SunPower; Briggs holds a PhD in applied physics from Stanford focused on high-temperature materials; and Bierman earned a PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT, where his thermal storage research drew coverage from Scientific American and MIT Technology Review. That combination of deep technical grounding and demonstrated commercial execution is part of what attracted us to Antora.
The investment fits squarely within our thesis on the infrastructure powering the AI buildout: as demand for firm power outpaces what the grid can deliver, energy solutions that can be sited quickly and cheaply become a critical unlock.
What’s Ahead
The near-term test for Antora is scaling manufacturing and repeating what it accomplished at Big Stone across a growing set of projects and geographies, including in international markets. Longer term, we see the intersection of storage, firm power, and AI infrastructure as one of the more important build-outs in energy this decade. Antora has demonstrated the technology, financing structures, and manufacturing needed to deliver affordable, reliable energy at the scale and speed this buildout requires.
We’re thrilled to join Antora’s Series C. We look forward to partnering with the team as they build out the next generation of firm, dispatchable power for the AI era.
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