R&D Test Operator

Antora raises $550 million for U.S.-made thermal battery storage. U.S. manufacturer closes funding round shortly after deploying 5 GWh thermal battery in South Dakota. New finance will be used to accelerate deployment and establish a second U.S. manufacturing facility. Aug 03 2026 Antora Energy has raised $550 million in a Series C funding round that saw the US energy storage company secure capital from new and existing investors. The funding announcement quickly follows the company's deployment of a 50 MW/5GWh thermal battery project in South Dakota. Antora deployed over 200 thermal batteries at POET's Big Stone City bioprocessing facility, delivering the project from initial construction to commissioning in under 12 months. Antora's thermal batteries work by storing electricity as heat in insulated blocks of solid carbon. The batteries are built at a factory in San Jose, California, which was expanded in spring 2026 with the addition of two new facilities - doubling manufacturing capacity, according to Antora. Funds raised in the latest financing round will allow Antora to deploy more projects, more quickly, according to Nehali Jain, the company's VP of strategy and growth. Antora plans to invest in further production capacity expansion, which will include establishing a second US manufacturing facility. The funding round was co-led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse, with participation from new investors including Ribbit Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Activate Capital, John Doerr, Westly Group, StepStone Group, and Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures. Existing investors also contributed to the round, including Decarbonization Partners, Impact Science Ventures, Trust Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Lowercarbon Capital. "From factories to data centers, energy is the bottleneck to industrial growth," said Andrew Ponec, co-Founder and CEO of Antora. "Antora has shown we can help break that bottleneck - delivering energy fast, at massive scale, with American innovation. With this funding round, we're continuing to strengthen our investment in U.S. manufacturing, delivering affordable energy across the country and around the world." This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with PV Magazine Group and would like to reuse some of its content, please contact: [email protected]. More about

Safe Superintelligence lands $5B from Nvidia, Index raises $2B, and the week funding became a pure power play. Safe Superintelligence secures a $5B Nvidia partnership, Index Ventures closes $2B across three funds, and mega-rounds cluster around energy, AI infrastructure, and the promise of AGI. Published August 1, 2026 This week the funding news split cleanly into two camps: teams building the compute and energy backbone for the next decade, and everyone else fighting for oxygen. Safe Superintelligence pulled $5 billion from Nvidia to scale its foundational AI lab, Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $1 billion for grid-scale fusion, and Antora Energy closed a $550 million Series C to supply thermal batteries to data centers. The message is clear: if you're not solving the power or compute problem, you're downstream. The numbers are staggering even by 2026 standards. Safe Superintelligence - founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever - now has the capital to dramatically expand its compute capacity in partnership with Nvidia. Commonwealth Fusion has raised $4 billion total. These aren't iterative product bets. They're long-horizon infrastructure plays that assume AI workloads will triple, then triple again. Energy and atoms got the biggest checks. Antora Energy's $550M round was led by G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse, with backing from Decarbonization Partners and Lowercarbon Capital. The company supplies energy to data centers via thermal batteries - a solution that sidesteps the grid entirely when you need consistent baseload power for racks that never sleep. Nuclear fission startup Antares raised $370 million in Series C equity to develop compact microreactors for defense and space applications. The defense angle is obvious: forward-deployed power that doesn't depend on fuel convoys. The space angle is newer but gaining traction as private stations and lunar missions move from PowerPoint to procurement. Function, the Austin-based health testing startup, secured $450 million in growth financing from General Catalyst. The company offers lab testing, imaging, and personal health data directly to consumers - no doctor's office gatekeeping. It's part of a broader trend where consumer health startups are raising growth equity at scale by promising to route around traditional care delivery. AI infrastructure bets ranged from agents to AGI labs. Prime Intellect raised a $130 million Series A led by Radical Ventures at a $1 billion valuation, making the two-year-old company a new unicorn. Prime Intellect helps enterprises build their own AI agents - the pitch is that you don't rent someone else's model, you train and deploy your own. That positioning resonated enough to cross ten figures in valuation. Simile, building AI tools for simulations and digital twins of individuals, raised over $200 million at a $2 billion post-money valuation. New York-based General Intuition, backed by Jeff Bezos, closed a $320 million round at a $2.3 billion valuation with investors including Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and researchers from MIT and Google DeepMind. Flapping Airplanes is reportedly in talks to raise hundreds of millions at a $5 billion valuation, in a round led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital with Kleiner Perkins participating. The startup focuses on cutting data usage in AI model training - a real bottleneck as training runs bump into physical limits on bandwidth and storage. Earlier this year Flapping Airplanes closed a $180 million seed round, which one backer called funding for a "young person's AGI lab." Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium raised a $100 million seed round backed by Nvidia. That's an unusually large seed, but if the company is building voice models that run efficiently on edge hardware, Nvidia has a strategic interest in making sure the software layer scales alongside the silicon. One startup used its own agent to close a $100M round. Lyzr, which builds AI agents for enterprises, used one of its own agents to help raise a $100 million funding round. That's either the best product demo ever or a very expensive proof-of-concept, depending on how much human oversight went into the process. Either way, it's on-brand for 2026: if your product is "AI that automates X," you're expected to use it internally before asking anyone else to adopt it. Ollama, the open-source AI developer tooling startup, raised $65 million as its user base approaches 9 million. The round reflects a broader shift: developers want to run models locally for speed, cost, and privacy, and they're willing to self-host infrastructure if the tooling is good enough. Index Ventures raised $2B and made itself a megafund. Index Ventures closed $2 billion in fresh capital across three funds: $400 million for a new seed fund, $900 million for a venture fund, and $700 million added to a 2024 growth fund. That gives the firm $3.5 billion in deployable capital. Index is an early investor in Wiz and Revolut, so it has the exits to justify the raise. But more importantly, it now has the dry powder to lead every round from seed through late-stage without bringing in a co-lead. Separately, Lovable is reportedly in discussions to raise a $300 million round led by Menlo Ventures that would double its valuation to about $13.2 billion, according to Sifted reporting. No details on what Lovable builds, but the valuation jump suggests either strong revenue traction or a term sheet negotiated in a very optimistic room. The seed stage still exists, but only for very specific bets. Ellis AI emerged from stealth with a $10 million seed round to build an AI-powered operations platform for private-credit managers. The round was backed by First Round Capital, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Slow Ventures. Founder Ryan Williams is a repeat entrepreneur, which explains the investor density at seed stage. Vector Legal raised $5.2 million in seed funding led by Base10 Partners to build legal operations software for in-house legal teams. Hush Security closed a $30 million Series A from Akamai Technologies, Battery Ventures, and YL Ventures to secure machine, application, and AI-agent identities. Discern Security raised a $13 million Series A led by Forgepoint Capital to expand its cybersecurity platform. Miami-based Cantina raised $8 million to build AI agents that automate cybersecurity tasks. The pattern: if you're raising a traditional seed or A round, you're either in security, vertical SaaS, or building tools for a very specific buyer persona. Horizontal plays and consumer experiments are mostly absent from the feed. The week's funding was a straightforward power play. The biggest checks went to companies solving decade-scale infrastructure problems. Everyone else is building on top of that stack and hoping it arrives on time.