Lunar Energy Lights Up With $300M For Smart-Home Tech

Investors’ appetite for clean energy tech seems to be insatiable right now.

Mountain View, California-based Lunar Energy became the latest startup in the sector to raise a large amount of funding, announcing it has closed $300 million of investment over two rounds in the past two years as it quietly worked in stealth.

Lunar Energy is attempting to build the full ecosystem of hardware and software needed to make homes completely energy independent—creating, storing and using the power they themselves generate.

The company is led by former Tesla executive Kunal Girotra and in two years has built a team of  nearly 250 employees.

“The first offering of our product ecosystem is a next-generation home battery system,” Girotra said in a release. “It’s the first step towards our mission to electrify all homes and connect communities to form clean, resilient virtual power plants—freeing us from power outages, rising energy costs and harmful emissions.”

Investors in the two rounds include San Francisco-based solar company Sunrun and South Korea’s SK Group.

Along with announcing the new funding, Lunar also said it has acquired U.K.-based distributed energy management software startup Moixa. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Big Money

Lunar’s raise is just the latest large investment made in the clean-tech sector. Just in the current third quarter of this year, other huge funding announcements in clean tech include:

• Swedish electric-vehicle battery manufacturer Northvolt raised $1.1 billion in a convertible note in July.
• Bill Gates-founded nuclear power firm TerraPower secured an equity raise that yielded a “minimum of $750 million” just last week.
• In July, Foothill Ranch, California-based nuclear fusion energy startup TAE Technologies raised a $250 million round that induced cash from the likes of Google and Chevron.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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