Moment Energy raises $40M to meet ‘infinite demand for power’ with EV batteries

Moment Energy CEO Edward Chiang believes demand for power in North America is infinite — and that his startup has the solution.

The company, which has headquarters in Canada and the United States, takes a novel approach to repurposing electric vehicle batteries, Chiang told TechCrunch. The company’s approach is special, he said, because of its dual focus on safety and modularity.

Investors apparently agree. On Tuesday, Moment Energy announced it has raised a $40 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to more than $100 million. The round was led by Canadian VC firm Evok Innovations, with additional funding from grocery retailer fund W23, joining existing investors like Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and In-Q-Tel, the CIA-funded VC firm.

In Chiang’s view, the electric grid in North America is in a losing race to keep up with this demand for power, driven by an increasingly extreme climate, the rise of electric vehicles, and the data center boom. So far, he says mostly Chinese companies have filled this demand — to the tune of about 72% of the global market, according to BNEF — adding a national security wrinkle to the picture.

Moment Energy is tackling this by taking battery packs from electric vehicles, ripping out the automakers’ battery management systems, and writing its own software to manage the packs. It then packages the battery modules into larger grid-scale storage solutions that can host a wide mix of battery chemistries, allowing customers to benefit from future advances in the technology while also reducing downtime if a particular module fails.

Crucially, Chiang said, Moment Energy is doing this all with UL Certification, making it the first company to repurpose batteries with a stamp of approval from the safety organization.

Chiang said other companies working on repurposing EV batteries for long-term storage often claim that they test their products against UL certification standards, but that they don’t actually obtain the certifications, which requires the use of certain components.

“What most other second life [battery] companies are now trying to say is, let’s just lobby to make second life UL certification easier, because it is impossible to get UL certification, as it stands,” he said. “But at Moment, we say that’s not true. We got it.”

UL certification may sound boring, but Chiang said it can make a difference not only when it comes to safety, but also in how these energy storage products are insured.

He claimed (without naming them) that other energy storage companies will leave an automaker’s battery management system in tact on the re-used batteries, and essentially trick the pack into thinking it’s still on the road to coax the right amount of discharge.

This could make these storage solutions either uninsurable or too costly to insure, Chiang said. He pointed to Liberty Mutual’s venture arm participation in Moment Energy’s Series B as proof that his company’s solution is above board.

“Maybe as engineers, or as consumers, we think that’s kind of interesting,” he said. “In reality, fire inspectors don’t think that’s interesting. Automakers don’t think that’s interesting. You can imagine if — I really hope this never happens — but if a battery catches fire, the fire inspector will say, ‘Oh, hey, there’s a Tesla battery management system in here, or there’s a Nissan battery management system in here,’ and the automaker will say: ‘I’ve never given permission for anybody to hack and bootleg my safety systems.’”

Chiang’s confidence seems to come from a number of places. Despite being small — Chiang said Moment Energy has around 72 employees — the company has signed supply deals with Mercedes-Benz and Nissan. It secured a $20 million loan from the Department of Energy. And it’s building a gigawatt-scale factory in Austin, Texas.

Moment also has a growing book of diverse customers, from utilities, to industrial companies, and — yes — data centers.

But Chiang said he also thinks a lot of Moment Energy’s approach comes from the fact that it’s a Canadian company at heart, removed from some of the most base impulses of Silicon Valley.

While Chiang said “all the data center companies have been reaching out to us,” he also stressed that his company didn’t want to walk into a trap by fundraising against promises that can’t be met.

“What we’ve been really thinking about as a whole is just staying focused overall in what we know, and what we’re building, and serving real customers, versus trying to sign up deals that are five years or 10 years down the road just to fundraise. And unfortunately, we see that a lot of Bay Area startups are less so trying to deliver product, but they’re trying to raise the next round,” he said.

“But for us, I think because we had roots up in Canada, a lot of Canadian companies focus on building a tangible business and a real, profitable business, as well as a high-growth business, and we’re pretty realistic when it comes to deployment.”