Hundred-hour battery maker Form Energy raised a $750 million Series G last week, amid rumors that the company is preparing to go public in 2027. The financing brings Form’s total equity raised to more than $2 billion — which is just behind home battery company Base Power, which recently raised a $1 billion Series D.
Form’s fundamentals, order books, and political tailwinds are all at all-time highs. Its first commercial-scale installation is underway in Minnesota. Manufacturing is scaling up at Form’s West Virginia factory, and Biden-era tax credits key for energy storage made it through the Republican budget overhaul last summer. And, despite chaos at the Department of Energy, Form’s promised federal funding has stayed on track. (CEO Mateo Jaramillo recently appeared on stage alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright on a DOE tour focused on energy affordability.)
And yet, Form raised its latest round at a $1.75-billion pre-money valuation, according to Axios: a significant downvaluation from the $3-billion pre-money valuation at which the company raised its Series F in October 2024.
But the down round isn’t necessarily cause for alarm, an investor in the round told Latitude Media on background, who added that it’s not a reflection of waning investor faith in iron-air batteries, or a sign that demand for next-gen power solutions to power data centers is being usurped by established solutions.
Instead, the raise is ultimately a “lagging indicator” of how tighter private markets and an AI-obsessed capital cycle are affecting even more mature startups. In 2024, there was significantly more capital “swimming around” for clean tech, they said, while today, the capital interested in investing in anything other than artificial intelligence is smaller. And Form, the investor added, isn’t considered a direct “AI beneficiary.”
Ironically, it’s Form’s versatility that gave investors conviction in the company to start with, they added. “The [total addressable market] for Form’s product is just immense…anywhere that you can put a gas peaker you can put a Form battery,” they explained. Additionally, Form’s “e-peaker” doesn’t require building gas pipelines and has lower operating costs than a traditional peaker.
But in a world where AI data centers never materialized, Form’s pipeline “would have looked roughly as it does, anyways.”
The public markets are already reflecting Form’s experience. Fuel cell maker Bloom Energy, for example, which is similarly working to capitalize on the data center power frenzy, has many fundamental data points that indicate its sales prospects are higher today than the beginning of the year, the analyst pointed out. However, while Bloom stocks were trading as high as $350 just a few months ago, they’ve now dropped to around $200.
Emerging, unproven tech solutions may face tougher terms from lenders as the largest data center projects turn to multi-billion dollar debt packages, the investor acknowledged. But that’s not the dynamic at play in Form’s valuation, partly because Form’s first major data center adjacent deal, with Xcel Energy and Google, is really a utility deal, meaning the project will sit in the utility’s rate base, backed by Google’s payments, rather than relying on project finance.
Ultimately, Form is facing an age-old problem for tech companies: “There’s a pocket of money that needs to invest in companies at the junction that Form is at, that doesn’t currently exist,” the investor said. “Twenty years ago, the public markets did that, but companies just don’t go public that early as often, and that’s why fundraisers have been much more challenging for capex-heavy companies.”
