Dutch iron-air battery startup Ore Energy secures $43M from Plural and HV Capital. August 4, 2026 * Ore Energy, a Dutch startup, has raised $43 million in Series A funding from Plural and HV. * The company plans to use the money to scale up its iron-air batteries, which can store renewable energy for up to 100 hours at about one-tenth the cost per unit of lithium-ion batteries. * This funding arrives at a time when global data centre electricity demand is expected to more than double to about 945 TWh by 2030. The increase is driven by AI workloads, which cause large and unpredictable changes in power use. Ore Energy, an Amsterdam-based battery tech startup, has raised a $43 million Series A round from Plural and HV, bringing its total funding to $61 million. Existing investor Positron Ventures also joined this round. Ore Energy's iron-air batteries can store renewable electricity for up to 100 hours and then return it to the grid. This costs about one-tenth as much per unit of capacity as lithium-ion storage. Co-founder and CEO Aytac Yilmaz told Tech Funding News that the main focus is on the levelized cost of electricity. "When you look at the renewables, they are actually the cheapest source of electricity that humankind has ever faced. Why we are not having renewables everywhere, even with a fossil-based system, is actually the intermittency of renewables. You don't know when the sun is going to be there, and you don't know when the wind is going to be there," he said. Yilmaz spent three years researching this technology as a PhD and postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft. He founded the company in 2023 with Rutil Özdemir and Yaiza Gonzalez Garcia. The main competitor for Ore Energy is natural gas. When gaps open between renewable supply and demand, Yilmaz said gas fills them today, and that's the market Ore is targeting. "Our actual direct competition is natural gas, because on current electricity grids, when there are multi-day regional gaps, gas fills that gap and holds a monopoly. That is the monopoly we are challenging," Yilmaz noted. Global data centre electricity demand is expected to more than double to about 945 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030, with AI data centres projected to more than quadruple in the same period. As AI infrastructure drives electricity demand to new heights, Yilmaz stated, "the way to energise them is through renewables. To make renewables a base load, reliable, dispatchable energy source, you need multi-day energy storage." In Europe, data centre electricity demand is expected to increase by 45 TWh by 2030, while the grid already wastes an estimated 72 TWh of renewable electricity annually due to bottlenecks. This equals Austria's annual electricity needs and is valued at nearly €7 billion, or about $8 billion, at current wholesale prices, according to the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. Since 2011, the UK has paid nearly £6 billion to curtail wind turbine output when the grid could not absorb it. A battery that 'breathes' Ore's technology exposes iron electrodes to oxygen, causing them to rust, and then uses electricity to reverse the reaction, converting rust back into iron. Made from iron, water, and air, the system avoids lithium and cobalt, reducing costs and reliance on imported minerals. It can be produced entirely within Europe. Ore has signed a 1 gigawatt-hour agreement with Dutch energy and telecom supplier Budget Thuis, as well as pilot deployments with the French utility EDF. The company aims to achieve gigawatt-hour-scale manufacturing by 2028 and to establish iron-air batteries as standard grid infrastructure across Europe by 2035. The new funding will primarily support scaling manufacturing and subsequent commercial deployments. Ore Energy currently employs about 50 people. Ian Hogarth, partner at Plural, said: "Long-duration energy storage is one of the biggest unsolved challenges in the energy transition, and unlocking it will transform how we power industry, scale AI data centres and drive economic growth. Aytac, Rutil and the team have combined world-class science with exceptional execution to make iron-air batteries commercially viable, whilst providing a critical technology, not just for Europe but as an important export technology too." Maxi Pethö-Schramm, principal at HV, added: "If we want to meet the future energy demands of AI data centres while providing European industry with affordable, reliable baseload power, then we need long-duration storage. Only then will Europe have the means to compete in the complex, energy-intensive sectors that will define the continent's future." Most lithium-ion grid batteries provide four to twelve hours of discharge, while Ore's are designed for up to 100 hours. Form Energy, the only other iron-air competitor mentioned by Ore's founder, has raised over $1.2 billion and reached a $3.42 billion valuation as of October 2024, with a West Virginia factory targeting 500 megawatts of annual capacity by 2028. Dutch company iwell and Swiss platform terralayr are also addressing Europe's grid-storage needs, though neither uses iron-air chemistry and both offer shorter storage durations. Large funding rounds have become more common as the sector matures: Redwood Materials raised $350 million at a $6 billion valuation in October 2025, and Base Power raised $1 billion the same month for distributed home battery storage in the US. Ore's $43 million round is modest by comparison. Iron-air technology remains unproven at commercial scale. Form Energy's first US site began operating in 2025, and Ore's battery has been grid-connected for less than a year. Whether this technology can reliably and cost-effectively replace natural gas or remain reliant on subsidies will determine the future of this category over the next five years.

Plural, a San Francisco - based tokenized asset management platform, has secured an oversubscribed $7.13 million seed round led by Paradigm, with participation from Maven11, Volt Capital, and Neoclassic Capital.