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Reservoir raises $8M to make water heaters that people — and the grid — will actually want

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  It’s hard to imagine a home appliance more forgotten — yet more consequential — than the water heater. Most people only think of water heaters when their shower runs cold, but they represent about 18% of a household’s total energy budget and are one of the main causes of residential water damage. To Luke Winston-Almanzar, water heaters are in clear need of an upgrade. “The typical water heater is devoid of intelligence, it’s using a god-awful amount of energy, and my air fryer is smarter than it,” he told TechCrunch. “I was using more energy to heat my water than it takes to drive my electric car.” So Winston-Almanzar, who was previously chief business officer at 3D printing startup Formlabs , co-founded Reservoir along with Gabriel Parisi-Amon and Jake Felser to make a water heater that they would want to buy. Reservoir announced Wednesday that it has raised $8 million in a seed round led by Asymmetric Capital Partners with participation from Founder Collective and MCJ. The f...
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Base Power raises another $1B to save the grid using backyard batteries

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  Where most energy storage companies look for big tracts of land near large connections to the grid, Base Power is betting that it can beat them all by putting batteries in people’s backyards instead. It appears to be paying off, with Base Power installing more than 500 megawatt-hours of storage over the past few years. The startup announced today that it has raised another $1 billion less than a year after its last billion-dollar round. The Series D values the company at a $13 billion post-money valuation. Base Power is installing about 100 batteries per day, according to The Wall Street Journal report, and it hopes to double that by the end of the year. That works out to about 8 megawatt-hours of storage installed per day. Base Power also rolled out a new version of its home battery today, called Base Core. The device is built at its Austin, Texas factory, and it can store 39.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity, significantly more than those of its competitors. Customers can choo...
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Texas halts new data centers as governor calls for audits

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  Tech companies and developers have been scouring the U.S. for places to build data centers, and they’ve been drawn to Texas’ loose regulations and seemingly abundant power supply. Only Virginia hosts more data centers than Texas. But even Texas can be pushed to the brink. Governor Greg Abbott announced Monday that all new data center projects will need to be audited by both the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). The size of ERCOT’s interconnection queue has grown dramatically this year. In January, ERCOT had 233 gigawatts of projects waiting to connect to its grid. In less than six months , that figure had more than doubled. Today, Abbott’s office said ERCOT is tracking 474 gigawatts of new connection requests. About 90% of those are data centers, according to the grid operator. Some of those projects are simply paper proposals at this point. Because queues for grid connections have grown s...
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SpaceX has bought $329M worth of Tesla Megapacks so far this year

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  SpaceX has ramped up purchases of Tesla Megapack, spending $295 million on the battery storage devices in the second quarter and $329 million so far this year, according to the company’s earnings report released on Tuesday. The purchase illustrates just how interconnected Elon Musk’s universe of companies are. Musk, who is the CEO and largest shareholder of SpaceX, also runs Tesla. Musk’s artificial intelligence business xAI acquired his social media platform, X, in 2025. Earlier this year, SpaceX gobbled up xAI. The industrial-scale batteries are likely being deployed at the company’s xAI data centers. Before xAI merged with SpaceX, the AI company bought $430 million worth of Megapacks for its data centers. In the first quarter of this year, xAI had purchased only $34 million worth of the equipment. SpaceX also reported that as of December 2025, it had acquired $131 million worth of Tesla Cybertrucks at manufacturer’s suggested retail price, according to its regulatory filing...
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Saudi Aramco backs India’s Mitti Labs to make Asia’s rice farming more water-resilient

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  As rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns put Asia’s water-intensive rice farming under pressure, Mitti Labs , a New York- and Bengaluru-headquartered climate-tech startup, has raised $9.5 million in an investment led by Aramco Ventures, Saudi Aramco’s venture arm, to expand across Asia with a platform that combines satellite imagery, AI, and field operations to help farmers cut water use and methane emissions. Other investors in the Series A round included existing backer Lightspeed India, as well as Godrej Industries Group, Cisco, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle. With the latest funding, Mitti Labs has now raised $12.5 million, including a $3 million seed round in July 2024. Rice, the staple food for more than half the world’s population, is one of the most water-intensive crops to grow. Rice fields kept under continuous flooding also account for a significant share of agricultural methane emissions. Since launching its first programs in 2023, Mitti Labs has ...
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Trump EPA wrongly canceled $20B in climate funds, appeals court rules

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  The Trump administration did not have the authority to terminate and claw back funding that had already been disbursed to climate nonprofits, an appeals court ruled on Tuesday. Eight nonprofit groups have been seeking to regain access to billions of dollars that had been deposited in their bank accounts after EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, along with the FBI and the Treasury Department, ordered Citibank to freeze their accounts in February 2025. The decision gives the groups access to their funding while the EPA decides whether to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. However, many of the organizations have had to enact significant cuts while their accounts were frozen. The judgment upholds an injunction preventing the EPA from taking back money that had already been disbursed to the nonprofits’ bank accounts. Six of 10 judges on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit supported lifting the injunction. The judges said that the EPA was attempting to cla...
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