GoKawiilMoment 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.
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