In the data center era, are public markets finally ready for long-duration energy storage? Form Energy, in the midst of a whirlwind year, is primed to be the industry’s test case.
The 100-hour iron-air battery company, founded in 2017, started deploying its first commercial batteries to the grid in October last year. Then, in late January, Axios reported that Form was in the midst of raising as much as $500 million, a round that would take the company into an initial public offering in 2027. One month later the company announced a 30 GWh deal with Xcel Energy, to help power a Google data center in Minnesota.
If Form does go public next year as rumored, it is likely to be the first long-duration energy storage company to do so via IPO — and will be a test for how public markets value multi-day storage.
Short-duration lithium-ion batteries remain the tech to beat for durations of up to eight hours, but the market for intra-day batteries is also maturing, thanks in large part to load growth and especially the power needs of the artificial intelligence boom.
Form doesn’t have a strict timeline for going public, CEO Mateo Jaramillo told Latitude Media in an interview, but it is certainly on the horizon. “We want to be ready in case the market is there for it,” he explained.
The rest of 2026 will therefore be about optimizing manufacturing and executing Form’s first wave of large projects. The company will begin scaling production of its second generation battery, designed for more automated, higher throughput manufacturing, lower costs, and increased reliability. Form will also “generate the first meaningful revenues this year,” Jaramillo added. The prerequisites for an IPO — like more stringent audits, detailed reporting, and upgraded financial controls — are all in the works, so that when the time is right, Form can move quickly.
Going public is largely a reflection of the scale of deals in Form’s pipeline, Jaramillo said, pointing to Xcel Energy and other, unannounced projects. (Form’s project with Xcel and Google is 200 times larger than its first commercial deployment.)
“We’re doing deals with large investor-owned utilities, large hyperscalers, and in some cases sovereign grid operators,” he explained. “If you think about the kind of counterparty that is best positioned in the market to do those scale of deals, thousands of megawatts at a time, it is a public entity.”
Form’s manufacturing capacity — which is scaling up to 500 megawatts a year out of its newly-expanded factory in West Virginia — is fully allocated for the next several years. “If somebody came to us with a meaningful size order, it’s late 2028, maybe 2029 before we can fulfill it,” Jaramillo said.
How will markets value LDES?
Form won’t be the first LDES company to enter the public arena. In the early 2020s, a string of companies went public via SPAC, including gravity system company Energy Vault and flow battery manufacturer ESS. Many of them ultimately struggled under the public market pressures, and none are currently trading at their peak valuations. Some, including Energy Vault, have pivoted away from their original pitch altogether.
Those disappointments aren’t necessarily indicators that public markets aren’t ready to appropriately value long duration storage, but rather that those companies moved too early, said Greg Reichow, a former manufacturing executive at Tesla. Public markets want to see a “very predictable growth curve,” explained Reichow, now a partner at venture capital firm Eclipse, (which is not an investor in Form), adding that the markets want to see companies “meet and beat quarter on quarter.”
“Companies that have gone public via SPAC well before they got to a consistently growing business, they really got punished in the public markets,” he said.
Form, thanks to the fact that it is signing large contracts with utilities, has a lot of forward visibility into its revenue and margins, Jaramillo said. That’s important for would-be public market investors, who are increasingly understanding capacity challenges thanks to the AI boom, he added.
Form is betting that this new awareness also means the company would be appropriately benchmarked for valuation. While there aren’t any other direct long-duration battery IPO comps currently on the market, the company is likely to be compared against a mix of other options for capacity, including natural gas turbines.
Reichow pointed to Tesla as having some clear similarities, despite operating in the automotive industry when it went public in 2010. Investors at the time didn’t value Tesla as an auto company, but rather as a tech company disrupting an existing industry, he explained. Form is likewise approaching a very large market with generation and infrastructure incumbents, but bringing a new type of technology.
“I think given the growth of the market and their ability to penetrate the market very quickly, you’re going to see the multiples that get applied to a company like [Form] look more like a tech multiple than a conventional infrastructure energy generation company would,” Reichow said.
Jaramillo, for his part, said he’ll be watching closely to see how the “blockbuster IPOs” in the energy sector perform later this year.
Manufacturing at scale
It would be easy to assume that recent momentum is entirely the result of the data center boom. But Jaramillo emphasized that Form’s plans for scale always involved reaching this point, where the company is signing large deals with major utilities and preparing for IPO. In the case of Xcel and others, conversations date back to well before the AI boom, he explained.
That said, data center demand has accelerated that timeline. Now, Form has customers “grabbing you by the collar, basically saying, I got to have this now,” he added. That has accelerated the ramp-up that Form has long anticipated, but only slightly, Jaramillo said.
“We were always taking sort of a 10-year view on the market,” he said. “And so the fact that it’s now here in, dare I say, year nine as opposed to year 10 or 11, it doesn’t really make that big of a difference.”
A lot of the recent activity in Form’s pipeline has been driven by tariff structures governing large load interconnection in various parts of the country, Jaramillo said.
Just as important as those tariffs, however, is the fact that Form is getting as much as 100% capacity accreditation in key jurisdictions, he added, which is a key market hurdle for LDES companies to clear. As Jaramillo’s cofounder Marco Ferrara told Latitude in late 2023, capacity markets (and vertically integrated utilities), have previously failed to recognize the full benefits of long-duration storage.
By securing the full capacity credit, Form is essentially being valued as a firm resource, aligning the iron-air batteries even more closely with natural gas turbines than with the shorter-duration lithium-ion batteries that currently make up most of the market.
Form has competition when it comes to its project pipeline in the still small world of intra-day storage, said Lukas Karapin-Springorum, a research associate at Sightline; however, there aren’t any other LDES companies hot on its heels for an IPO, despite impending changes to capacity market structures. Other 100-hour battery companies are at varying stages of early-stage commercialization: Quidnet Energy has a 27.5 MWh demonstration project; Noon Energy and Ore Energy are at pilot stage; others are still in the lab. According to Karapin-Springorum’s analysis, though, all have estimated annual revenues below $10 million.
Form has shown that its tech works, and, via its latest project with Xcel, is showing that utilities trust it at scale, Jaramillo said. Now, the company faces other challenging decisions, particularly around manufacturing capacity.
By the time the company goes public, it will be well into production of its Gen 2 battery. The question, according to Jaramillo, will be how much the company has ramped up, and its expected progress. “It does not matter where you start, the questions are always, how do you get to the next point?” he explained. “That’s true whether you’re making a single megawatt, 100 megawatts, or 1,000 megawatts.”
Form’s core technology isn’t changing from the first generation battery to the second, he clarified; it’s really how the cell is assembled. But because it’s a process change from the first manufacturing cycle, the company is moving cautiously when it comes to adding more production capacity in the near future, despite the “surging” demand it’s seeing, Jaramillo said.
“You don’t want to foolishly run into extremely high volumes overnight,” he explained. That means not getting “overzealous” on production for 2026 and 2027: “Anytime you do something new, you should make sure you get it right before you really start to scale it.”
