While EVs grab headlines, the real battery boom is happening in your neighbor's garage. Lunar Energy just closed back-to-back funding rounds totaling $232 million to transform home batteries into a virtual power plant that can stabilize America's strained electrical grid. The six-year-old startup has now raised over $500 million to scale production from thousands of units to 100,000 by 2028, betting that distributed residential storage will replace polluting peaker plants faster than anyone expected.
Lunar Energy is making a big bet that America's electrical grid will be saved one garage at a time. The startup announced Wednesday it has completed two massive funding rounds - a previously unannounced $130 million Series C and a fresh $102 million Series D - pushing its total capital raised past the half-billion-dollar mark.
The Series C was led by Activate Capital, while B Capital and Prelude Ventures co-led the Series D. According to the announcement published on TechCrunch, the timing couldn't be better for stationary storage solutions.
Stationary batteries have become the unexpected winner in the energy transition. While electric vehicles face policy headwinds after the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress gutted parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, grid-connected storage keeps attracting investor cash. The reason is simple: America's electrical infrastructure is buckling under pressure from an increasingly electrified economy and the explosive growth in data center demand.
Lunar's approach transforms individual home batteries into collective grid assets. The company manufactures battery packs in 15 kilowatt-hour and 30 kilowatt-hour modules for homeowners across California, Georgia, and Washington. But the real innovation isn't the hardware - it's the virtual power plant software that orchestrates these distributed batteries to act as a single, massive energy resource.
When grid operators need extra juice during peak demand, Lunar can call on its fleet to discharge stored electricity. The VPP software goes further, controlling EV chargers and appliances to simultaneously reduce consumption while boosting supply. Industry analysts expect these virtual power plants to replace costly natural gas peaker plants - the dirty, expensive generators utilities fire up during demand spikes - within just a few years.
