Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate Tech

Tyba Raises $14 Million to Help Batteries Make Money

The startup told Heatmap exclusively that the funding will help it reach new markets in the U.S. and abroad.

Tyba facilities.
Heatmap Illustration/Tyba, Getty Images

By 2035, BloombergNEF projects that the U.S. will build an additional 221 gigawatts of battery storage, a more than 10-tenfold increase from July of last year. But as intermittent renewables, rising electricity demand, and extreme weather make grid operations increasingly complex, it can be a struggle for energy producers to manage their battery assets as efficiently and profitably as they could be — discharging when prices are highest and energy is needed most and charging when prices are lowest.

Tyba helps a range of companies — from oil major TotalEnergies to smaller, independent energy producers — optimize their battery storage systems. The startup’s AI-enabled platform provides timely, accurate price forecasts and automates energy dispatch decisions and bidding strategies to sell electricity into the market. The company just raised a $13.9 million Series A round, led by the climate tech investor Energize Capital, bringing its total funding to $18.5 million. Tyba currently supports over 1 gigawatt of batteries in California and Texas, but Baker told me this latest funding round will allow the company to expand into new markets domestically, and eventually internationally.

“When there’s a winter storm, or when there’s a plant that trips offline, prices can go up from, on average, $50 to $5,000, and so that massive spike drives a tremendous amount of revenue. In a single five-minute interval, we might earn up to 20% of the revenue for a year,” Tyba’s CEO and co-founder Michael Baker told me. “Our forecast strategies and also our bidding strategies are especially tuned to forecasting those events and making sure we’re in the market to sell power and capture that.”

Referring to data from Texas energy regulator ERCOT, Baker told me that top-performing battery assets there generated about 50% more revenue than average-performing assets, and that the batteries Tyba managed were consistently in the top tier. (California doesn’t release as much data, so he can’t be as precise, but Baker said “the uplift is comparable“ there.) Energy producers today generally work with less sophisticated, bespoke software solutions that are difficult to replicate, as they’re usually tailor-made to solve specific problems in specific markets. Especially in a political environment that’s unfriendly to renewables development in general, though, making battery storage systems the most profitable option for power producers is an obvious way to ensure they’re more widely deployed.

“These developers, they’re infrastructure companies. They’re not technology companies,” Tyler Lancaster, a partner at Energize Capital, explained. And they’ve had a hard time building software that can keep up with the ever-changing needs of the grid. “As a result, they’ve seen those assets and those batteries that they’ve deployed generate a lot less revenue than they thought.”

The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions are likely areas for growth due to their acute grid capacity needs, he said. Many of Tyba’s customers are working closely with data center developers as tech companies desperately seek out clean, reliable power to support their AI-driven load growth.

As for the impact of President Trump’s increased tariffs on Chinese imports or the potential elimination of Inflation Reduction Act incentives such as the investment and production tax credits, neither would be good news for the battery storage sector at large. “If we do have substantial tariffs and there is any impact on the tax credits, that will certainly slow down the pace of deployment and the growth of these technologies,” Baker told me. Tyba’s customers are gearing up. “They’re definitely preparing for the worst, including things like pre-purchasing equipment years in advance.”

The economics of battery storage have to be an undeniable winner to weather these headwinds, and Baker is confident that Tyba can help the sector continue its momentum over the next four years and beyond. As he told me, “The overall fundamentals of renewable energy are pretty undeniable.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the description of Tyba’s model.

Green

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate

AM Briefing: How Clean Energy Fared in Q1

On earnings, a DOJ memo, and flying cars

How Clean Energy Fared in Q1
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Yosemite could get 9 inches of snow between now and Sunday Temperatures will rise to as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, as Central and Southeast Asia continue to bake in a heatwave Hail, tornadoes, and severe thunderstorms will pummel the U.S. Heartland into early next week.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Tariffs, uncertainty were the themes of the week in clean energy Q1 calls

It was a busy week of earnings calls for the clean energy sector, which, as a whole, saw investment dip by nearly $8 billion in the first three months of the year. Tariffs — especially as they impact the battery supply chain — as well as changes to federal policy under the new administration and electricity demand were the major themes of the week, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Sparks

The First Sign the U.S. Oil and Gas Sector Is Pulling Back

Three weeks after “Liberation Day,” Matador Resources says it’s adjusting its ambitions for the year.

Money and an oil rig.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

America’s oil and gas industry is beginning to pull back on investments in the face of tariffs and immense oil price instability — or at least one oil and gas company is.

While oil and gas executives have been grousing about low prices and inconsistent policy to any reporter (or Federal Reserve Bank) who will listen, there’s been little actual data about how the industry is thinking about what investments to make or not make. That changed on Wednesday when the shale driller Matador Resources reported its first quarter earnings. The company said that it would drop one rig from its fleet of nine, cutting $100 million of capital costs.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Climate Tech

Rise and Grind Through the Apocalypse

At San Francisco Climate Week, everything is normal — until it very much isn’t.

San Francisco.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

San Francisco Climate Week started off on Monday with an existential bang. Addressing an invite-only crowd at the Exploratorium, a science museum on the city’s waterfront, former vice president and long-time climate advocate Al Gore put the significance and threat of this political moment — and what it means for the climate — in the most extreme terms possible. That is to say, he compared the current administration under President Trump to Nazi Germany.

“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil,” Gore conceded before going on: “But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” Just as German philosophers in the aftermath of World War II found that the Nazis “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,” Gore said, so too is Trump’s administration “trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” in which we can keep burning fossil fuels forever. With his voice rising and gestures increasing in vigor, Gore ended his speech on a crescendo. “We have to protect our future. And if you doubt for one moment, ever, that we as human beings have that capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.”

Keep reading...Show less
Green