Startup Base Power struggled to explain what its selling, so it used partnerships to spark growth

Everything is bigger in Texas. Trucks. Belt buckles. Hats. And power outages.

Equal parts energy provider and generator, Base Power says it creates hardware that brings energy bills down for Texans and provides much-needed support for the grid—one that is all-too-frequently tested, and overloaded, during extreme weather events, causing mass power outages (and inflated energy bills).

Currently, pricing starts at $595 fee for a single battery, plus an annual membership fee ranging from $225 to $345. This is to say, Base Power is in the subscription business, where scaling is everything.

However, after getting off the ground in 2023, the company faced an almost immediate problem: Homeowners were still in the dark about what services Base Power actually provided. In response to consumer unfamiliarity, the company came up with a three-pronged sales approach to help better communicate its offerings, sure, but to also generate more revenue.

“It took some explaining and some time to really translate our positioning and our language,” Base Power’s head of growth Cole Jones told us. “But some of the early things we learned is, you got to explain it. You got to get some buy-in.”

Jones, who previously led product growth at SpaceX, had to find a solution to the hurdle of consumer unfamiliarity.

First, the sales team pitched door-to-door. Jones acknowledged the limitations of this approach, such as inefficiency and lots of noes, but it also helped Texans understand the company better, and every hardware unit sold this way also became leverage it could use later for other aspects of its sales strategy.

Second, Base Power used its initial door-to-door sales to spark a partnership strategy that is generating double-digit growth. For example, the startup inked a partnership with Lennar, one of the nation’s largest homebuilders by revenue, last December to install new homes with a complementary backup battery from Base Power and access to its energy services.

By doing so, the company has built in a captive audience who already has the infrastructure for its energy storage services—and fish where the fish are is rarely a bad sales strategy.

“But essentially, when our homes come with a free battery, [it’s] so easy, [a] no-brainer for homeowners to sign up for Base that way,” Jones said.

So far, Base Power has sold 2,000 energy storage batteries, and the total number of batteries it has deployed has reached into the thousands.

The more batteries the startup sells, the more megawatt hours, or emergency electricity, it can store. In turn, the product then becomes more valuable to homeowners, homebuilders looking to beef up amenities, and Base Powers’s third sales pool—utility companies.

With over 130 retail electricity providers providing services to 31 million residents in Texas, the nation’s third fastest growing state, Tim Pianta, Base Power’s head of utility partnerships, has a simple vision.

Instead of selling to individual residents, Pianta and Base Power have opted to reach them through these existing energy providers, a model that is almost completely unheard of in the state.

Given how new to market Base Power is, Pianta says pitching to these utility companies poses a challenge.

“Reliability and stability are the most important attributes of the grid,” Pianta said. “And so things that could represent a distortion to those elements are seen as risky, and people are anxious to pursue those.”

Meanwhile, utility providers have been tasked with figuring out how to meet the state’s growing energy needs, with annual peak energy demands skyrocketing from 67,000 megawatts in 2014 to 85,000 in 2023. For the Austin-based startup, the appeal is clear: Making deals with utilities means mass sales in batteries to residents in those areas, and, most importantly, more paying members.

Therein lies Pianta’s pitch: sell utilities the security of energy relief while at the same time compounding recurring membership revenue.

“Once there are 10,000 batteries on the grid, we will then be able to use those to do all sorts of new things and drive a ton of value and sort of reimagine the electrical system. But we don’t show up with, reimagine the electrical system on day one; we show up with, here’s batteries to help homeowners have resiliency,” Pianta said.

This philosophy has already materialized in deals with utilities like Bandera Electric Cooperative, located outside of San Antonio. In 2025, after Base Power made deals with Lennar and Bandera, it saw 30% sales growth rate month over month, which suggests this sales strategy is working.

Beyond expanding a burgeoning startup, experts tell Revenue Brew battery storage could be key to stabilizing a Texas power grid that, according to a report from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, could see demand double by 2031.

“I could not overstate how important battery storage is for the grid,” Doug Lewin, author of “The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter” and host of the podcast “Energy Capital,” said.“We have 11,000 megawatts worth of storage in Texas right now. Austin Energy’s peak is 3,000, so we basically have three or four Austin’s worth of battery storage on the grid right now.”

As $200 million of funding rolls in, Base Power seems to be using that investment to map out this near expansion, and it has already indicated that it could replicate the same model in other states.