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.
The endangered Great Lakes piping plover. Alexandra Buxbaum/Majority World/Universal Images Group via Getty Images