Antora Raises $550M Series C as AI Data Centers Drive Energy Demand

Antora Energy, a San Jose, California-based company that provides energy through thermal batteries to data centers, announced a $550 million Series C funding round. G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the financing, with participation from Decarbonization Partners, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, John Doerr, Ribbit Capital and others. With the latest round, Antora has raised $770 million since its 2017 inception, per Crunchbase; the company did not reveal its valuation.

Antora says it will use the new capital to speed up deployment of “large-scale” projects across the country to meet surging energy demand. The company is positioning its technology around the power needs created by the artificial intelligence boom, especially from data centers. For readers tracking AI infrastructure, the key takeaway is that energy availability is becoming a central constraint for growth.

Antora says its thermal batteries store low-cost electricity as heat in insulated blocks of solid carbon and deliver it around the clock as heat or power. The company recently deployed what it describes as one of the world’s largest battery storage projects, a 5 gigawatt-hour system in South Dakota. It says the same factory-built modules can serve a chemical plant, food producer, steelmaker, data center or the grid, while avoiding supply-constrained critical minerals and multi-year construction timelines.

Crunchbase News notes that cleantech venture investment has been relatively modest in recent years despite rising energy demand from AI data centers. Antora’s raise marks one of the sector’s largest this year. Crunchbase data cited in the article shows investors put more than $15 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for cleantech, EV and sustainability-focused companies in the first half of 2026.