This week, capital chased the same problem from two different directions: the grid can’t keep up with AI data centers and EV charging, and whoever fixes that gets funded first. Here are the five stories shaping the week, and what they signal for where the next wave of startups is headed.
1. Base Power and Valar Atomics each raise $1B, the week’s two biggest bets on power
Base Power, an Austin home battery maker, closed a $1 billion Series D at a $13 billion valuation, led by Ribbit Capital, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, with a long list of participants including Altimeter, Coatue, Thrive Capital, a16z, and Lightspeed. Its new Base Core battery backs up homes during outages and sells power back to utilities, and the company is already installing about 100 units a day. Total funding to date now tops $2.5 billion.
The same day, Sequoia Capital led a separate $1 billion round for Valar Atomics, a nuclear microreactor startup, valuing it at $6 billion. Valar says the money moves it from demonstrating small reactors to producing them in volume, and it has also lined up a $200 million credit facility. Two very different technologies, same underlying bet: the US power grid needs new capacity fast, and investors want a piece of whoever can add it.
2. Moove raises $250M to build the infrastructure behind self-driving fleets
Moove, founded in Lagos and now headquartered in Abu Dhabi, closed a $250 million Series C co-led by Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, Toyota’s Woven Capital, and Ion Pacific, with BlackRock and Franklin Templeton also participating, at a valuation of about $2.1 billion. Moove already runs one of the world’s largest human-driven ride-hail fleets (42,000 cars across 13 countries) and partners with Waymo in Phoenix and Miami. Cofounder Ladi Delano describes the new capital as funding the unglamorous part of autonomy: charging hubs, maintenance, data systems, and city-level operations, not just the cars themselves.
3. HappyRobot becomes a unicorn with $150M for enterprise AI agents
US-Spanish startup HappyRobot raised a $150 million Series C led by Prysm Capital and Eurazeo, joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and Base10, at a $1.2 billion valuation. Its AI agents already automate freight and logistics paperwork for shippers like DHL and Uber, and the new money pushes into insurance, energy, and telecom, industries stacked with the kind of repetitive, multi-step coordination work that’s expensive to set up and hard for a competitor to copy.
4. Sapiom raises $35M to keep AI agents from burning through compute budgets
A smaller round with a good signal: San Francisco’s Sapiom closed a $35 million Series A led by Dragonfly, with Accel and Coinbase Ventures participating, just 11 months after the company was founded and six months after a $15 million seed. Sapiom routes an AI agent’s tasks to whichever model or tool is cheapest and most reliable at each step, aiming to control the runtime costs that stack up once a company is running dozens of agents in production. Anthropic is among its investors. As more startups move agents from demo to production, expect more of this cost control tooling to raise fast follow on rounds.
5. The bigger picture: this week, power was the story
Two of the week’s three largest rounds went to companies solving the same bottleneck from different angles: batteries in homes, reactors in factories. It follows Antora Energy’s $550 million round for industrial thermal batteries just days earlier and Ore Energy’s $43 million raise for iron air storage. Data centers and EVs are pulling more electricity than the grid was built to deliver, and venture capital has decided the winners will be whoever removes that constraint, however unglamorous the hardware looks on a pitch deck.
The takeaway: the physical constraints, power, compute, hardware, are where the money’s going right now. Teams that can point to a specific bottleneck they’re removing are raising faster than teams pitching a vision.