Moment Energy Raises $40 Million to Meet ‘Infinite Demand for Power’ with EV Batteries

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

The company, which has headquarters in Canada and the United States, is taking a new approach to recycling batteries for electric vehicles, Chiang told TechCrunch. The company’s approach is special, he said, because of its dual focus on security and modularity.

Investors seem to agree. On Tuesday, Moment Energy announced that 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 such as Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and In-Q-Tel, the CIA-funded VC firm.

In Chiang’s view, the power 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 that demand — to the extent of about 72% of the global market, according to BNEF — adding a wrinkle of national security to the picture.

Moment Energy tackles this by taking battery packs from electric vehicles, ripping out 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 technology while reducing downtime if a particular module fails.

Crucially, Chiang said, Moment Energy does all this with UL certification, making it the first company to recycle batteries with a seal of approval from the safety organization.

Chiang said other companies working to recycle EV batteries for long-term storage often claim they test their products against UL certification standards, but they don’t actually achieve the certifications, which require 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’s impossible to get UL certification as it stands,” he said. “But at the moment we’re saying 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 intact on the recycled batteries, essentially tricking the pack into thinking it’s still on track to coax the right amount of discharge.

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

“Maybe as engineers or as consumers, we think it’s kind of interesting,” he said. “In reality, fire inspectors don’t think it’s interesting. Automakers don’t think it’s interesting. You can imagine if — I really hope it 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 never say, ‘I’ll never be allowed to hack’ my security systems.”

Chiang’s confidence seems to come from a number of places. Despite being small — Chiang said Moment Energy has about 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 clients, from utilities to industrial companies and – yes – data centers.

But Chiang said he also believes much of Moment Energy’s approach comes from the fact that it is 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 reached out to us,” he also emphasized that his company did not want to fall into the trap of raising money against promises that cannot be kept.

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

“But for us, I think because we had roots 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 implementation.”