# The Biggest Venture Check of the Week Went to a Backyard Battery - The Raise - Week of August 10, 2026 > For the week of August 3 to 9, 2026, the largest round of the year went to home batteries rather than a chatbot, with $1.37 billion into a defense-parts factory and $300 million into rented data-center power alongside it, plus a founder's account of the term sheet that quietly capped her company for a decade. ## The Raise ### Week of August 10, 2026: The Biggest Venture Check of the Week Went to a Backyard Battery --- *Week of Aug 03 to Aug 09, 2026: the biggest venture check of the week didn't go to a chatbot, it went to a battery in someone's backyard. Plus a masterclass in how one bad term sheet can haunt a company for a decade.* On Tuesday, August 4th, a company called Base Power told the world it had raised **$1 billion at a $13 billion valuation**, and the hosts of The Best One Yet flat-out called it "the biggest fundraiser of the year." Here's the part I love: Base doesn't build a model, a copilot, or an agent. It builds a battery the size of a small wine cooler and bolts it into your backyard. I keep coming back to that this week, because it says something about where the smart money is actually going. Everyone talks about AI as if the only thing being funded is software. But look at the actual checks that cleared over the last seven days: a billion into home batteries, $1.37 billion into a defense-parts factory, $300 million into a company that rents out data-center power, hundreds of millions into an AI lab that learns from video games. The theme of the week isn't "bits." It's **atoms**, energy, factories, and the physical plumbing underneath the AI boom. The models get the headlines; the picks-and-shovels get the money. Let me walk you through it. ## This Week's Rounds - **Base Power (BASE)**, **$1B at a $13B valuation.** Austin-based maker of large home backup batteries, founded by Zach Dell (yes, son of Michael Dell of "Dude, you're getting a Dell"). The twist that makes it interesting: the battery serves two customers at once. You pay $695 to install it plus $19 a month, and when the grid goes down it keeps your lights on, but the rest of the time the local utility can draw power from it during peak demand. Base has already installed 23,000 batteries across Texas and Illinois. It's essentially one power plant scattered across thousands of backyards, aimed squarely at a Texas grid now straining under 140 data centers under construction. *(The Best One Yet, "🥥 'Coco FOMO' Vita Coco's 5x IPO. Garmin's Y2K watch. Dell's backyard battery dude. +James Bond WFH" (2026-08-04); also flagged on TBPN, "Astra Ends Math, 1 Person $1M Companies, Hank Green Is Absolutely Right" (2026-08-03))* - **Hadrian**, **$1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation,** led by WCM Investment Management, Washington Harbor Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures, and Baillie Gifford. Hadrian builds highly automated factories that manufacture parts for military vehicles and defense hardware. This is the defense-industrial-base thesis at full volume, the money is for building more automated plants to churn out physical components. *(TechCrunch Startup News, "Naïve automates the grunt work of setting up and running a company, plus, Defense tech Hadrian raises $1.37B, and Omilia raises $67M to scale its customer support platform" (2026-08-07))* - **Volta Infra**, **~$300M Series A at a $2.4B valuation,** led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Altimeter. Volta is an NVIDIA-backed ($NVDA) AI-cloud startup founded in January 2026 by former Brookfield Asset Management executives. It leases out AI computing capacity and helps clients finance the cost of chips. The reason it could raise at that price: it just landed a **$10 billion, six-year compute contract** with Anthropic, and is building a 133-megawatt data center in Norway stocked with NVIDIA's newest Vera Rubin chips. *(Tech Brew Ride Home, "OpenAI Has Receipts" (2026-08-04))* - **General Intuition**, **$133M seed plus a fresh $320M Series A.** An AI research lab that trains AI agents on video-game data, the bet being that games are the cheapest, richest place to teach an agent how to act in a world. Founding member Moritz Baier-Lentz (who built Goldman Sachs' gaming practice and later ran gaming at Lightspeed) walked through it on the show. *(Summation with Auren Hoffman, "Moritz Baier-Lentz on why the future of AI runs on video games" (2026-08-04))* - **Omilia**, **$67M Series B,** led by Expedition Growth Capital. Omilia runs an AI customer-support platform, and its pitch is contrarian: it deliberately avoids using large language models for basic queries (cheaper, more reliable), reserving them only where they add value. It's already at roughly $60M in annual recurring revenue with clients like Capital One. *(TechCrunch Startup News, "Naïve automates the grunt work... Hadrian raises $1.37B, and Omilia raises $67M..." (2026-08-07))* - **Ore Energy**, **$43M Series A.** An Amsterdam-based startup building iron-air batteries for long-duration energy storage, the kind of multi-hour storage a renewables-heavy grid needs. It just signed a one-gigawatt-hour storage deal with a Dutch utility, which is what gives the round its teeth. *(Factor This, "This Week in Cleantech (08/07/2026) - With speed to power in mind, data centers are eyeing fuel cells" (2026-08-07))* - **Naïve**, **$28.5M** (stage and lead investor not disclosed on the podcast). Naïve gives AI agents an API to actually set up and run a company: business formation, payments, accounting, cloud infrastructure. The eye-popping stat: with a team of just 10, it says revenue grew roughly 10x in six months to the low double-digit millions, with 30,000 developer customers. *(AI Update, "Suno adds watermarks for AI music spam | Google Maps books hotels" (2026-08-06))* - **Boardy.ai**, **$8M seed,** notable mostly for how it was raised: founder Andrew D'Souza says the AI networking company closed the round "through autonomous pitching", letting its own AI do the pitching. File under "cute, and also a sign of the times." *(Spark of Ages, "The AI With 160,000 Friends That Networks For You/Andrew D'Souza - Boardy.ai" (2026-08-07))* A couple of larger numbers floated across the podcasts that I'm flagging rather than banking: the 20VC crew headlined that **Moonshot AI raised $3.5B at a $35B valuation** (the Chinese lab behind Kimi), and multiple AI shows noted French lab **Mistral raising at a ~$23B valuation, roughly double** its ~$13.5B mark from a year earlier. Both were discussed as this week's news but without the round-level detail I'd want before treating them as confirmed. *(The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), "20VC: Airtable Sold for $1.285BN | ... | Moonshot AI Raises $3.5B at $35B | ..." (2026-08-06); AI Update, "Anthropic's $10 Billion Cloud Deal, Elon Musk on AI at Tesla" (2026-08-04))* And a note on honesty: I deliberately left two "rounds" out. Get the Check spent time on Simili's $2B Series B, but on the show itself the hosts made clear those raises happened months ago, not this week. And a $200M seed for AI-bio lab Marendil got airtime, but it closed back in late June, outside our window. Neither belongs in a weekly round-up dated this tightly. ## Founder Story of the Week The best fundraising story of the week wasn't a mega-round at all. It was a cautionary tale, and it's exactly the kind of thing a founder should read before signing anything. On How I Built This, **Lily Kanter and Serena Dugan**, the co-founders of home-and-kids furnishings brand **Serena & Lily**, told the story of the deal that almost sank them. This is roughly 2006. They'd bootstrapped a wholesale bedding business for three and a half years without paying themselves, and demand was outrunning their cash. As Kanter put it, the growth was "a cash incinerator", they needed working capital to fund a big 2007 product launch, so they set out to raise a $1.5 million friends-and-family round. They went to a private-equity firm's CFO just to get an opinion on their valuation. Within ten minutes, a general partner strolled in and offered to write the entire $1.5 million as a single check. It felt like a gift. Then Kanter described how it actually went: > *"He literally patted us on the heads like we were dogs or puppies. Or children. He took a seat at the table and said, you girls sure have been busy."* The term sheet arrived, and a lawyer friend who represented founders read it and hit the roof: > *"And she called me back and she's like, I forbid you to do this deal. You're not doing this deal. And I'm like, we need the money."* The reason: the "gift" was a trap. The PE firm wanted **controlling interest in the company in exchange for just 17% of the equity**, control without owning most of the business. Their attorney forced the worst language out, but then the partner balked when the founders said they wanted to pay themselves $150,000 salaries after years of nothing. Kanter's husband, listening on speakerphone, ended the debate: > *"And when I hung up, he's like, honey, we're going to take a second on the house. You're not doing that deal."* They walked away from the single check. Instead, in the middle of December, with production for the 2007 launch that had to be paid for by mid-January, they ran the friends-and-family round the hard way: > *"And we raised the money in a 17-day sprint."* > > *"It was pretty much every one of our family members. And a slew of friends. And Lily's rabbi. You name it."* Here's why this is more than a feel-good bootstrapping anecdote. Years later, at around $20 million in revenue, one of their investors, the type who wanted them to slow down and chase profits rather than growth, turned hostile and **actually sued the company** for "irreparable harm" to his investment. To make him go away, Kanter flew out and negotiated a buyout: his money back plus a 50% return. But their main investor on Sand Hill Road had to fund that buyout, and did it on brutal terms: > *"They actually put the money into the company on top of our cap stack, on top of the capital chart, at a very heavy-duty preference of a 2X preferred participating, very gnarly security... And got them bought out but made it nearly impossible, actually impossible, to raise additional money for the company."* In plain English: a "2X preferred participating" preference means that whenever the company eventually sold or raised again, that investor got double their money back first, before founders, employees, or anyone else saw a dime, and *then* still took their ownership share on top. It's a stacked deck, and it poisoned the whole cap table. Kanter saw it immediately: > *"I said to him, we will never be able to raise another dollar for this company."* She was basically right. The terms were so lopsided that every future investor would demand the same thing, and two later acquisition offers became nearly impossible to accept because so much of the value would have been eaten by that preference (one buyer even wanted the founders' "name, image, and likeness in perpetuity" plus three-year employment contracts, which they refused to sign). For context, Dugan noted the company's valuation at the time of all this was "not over $50 million." The lesson the founders drew is the one worth tattooing on every first-time entrepreneur's arm, good money versus bad money: > *"There is definitely a correlation between how badly you need the money and when you are raising money, what the terms are. So egregious terms are more likely if you need the money and they can read that."* That's the whole game in two sentences. The moment your counterparty can smell that you're desperate, the terms get worse, and the terms, not the headline valuation, are what you live with for the next ten years. *(How I Built This with Guy Raz, "Serena & Lily: Serena Dugan and Lily Kanter. They Built a $20M Brand Then One Investor Almost Destroyed It" (2026-08-03))* ## Also Heard - **The other side of the raise: a masterclass in "social proof."** On Summation, gaming investor Moritz Baier-Lentz (of the General Intuition round above) gave the most useful fundraising advice I heard all week, that the single strongest lever a founder has isn't the deck, it's proof that credible people already believe in you: *"I would basically design my entire fundraise around the idea and the notion of social proof first and foremost... whether you have a pitch deck or not, you know, sometimes doesn't even matter that much."* He'd know, he claims he "raised over $2 billion this year" across his portfolio companies, "half of that... done without a pitch deck." *(Summation with Auren Hoffman, "Moritz Baier-Lentz on why the future of AI runs on video games" (2026-08-04))* - **Airtable sold for ~$1.28B, and SaaS founders should pay attention.** No-code pioneer Airtable agreed to be acquired by newly public Italian rollup Bending Spoons for an enterprise value of about $1.28 billion (implied equity value ~$2.25B, mostly cash on the balance sheet). The gut-punch: Airtable was worth $11.7 billion in 2021. It's still growing ARR north of 20% to roughly $480M, yet nobody outbid Bending Spoons, no PE firm, no Vista, no Thoma Bravo. The 20VC panel spent real time on what it means that a good, profitable productivity app got scooped up this cheaply in the age of AI tools like Lovable and Claude Code that let you "bang out" your own app from scratch. *(Tech Brew Ride Home, "OpenAI Has Receipts" (2026-08-04); The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), "20VC: Airtable Sold for $1.285BN..." (2026-08-06))* - **The AI money merry-go-round keeps spinning.** Anthropic's new $10B compute deal with Volta (above) is a perfect example of what Tech Brew called "circular financing", NVIDIA ($NVDA) backs a cloud startup, the cloud startup buys NVIDIA chips, an AI lab signs a giant contract with the cloud startup, and everyone's valuation goes up together. On Prof G Markets, the hosts noted Anthropic is separately in early talks with Blackstone for roughly $36 billion in debt to lease AI chips, a reminder of how much of this boom is now running on borrowed money. *(Tech Brew Ride Home, "OpenAI Has Receipts" (2026-08-04); Prof G Markets, "Apple's War On OpenAI Just Got Personal" (2026-08-05))* - **Data centers... in space.** On the Y Combinator podcast, the founder of Starcloud made the case for putting data centers in orbit (free cooling, unlimited solar), and mentioned a Benchmark-led $170M Series B backing the idea, up from an $11M post-YC round at a $40M valuation. Wild swing-for-the-fences energy, and another data point in the week's "compute is a physical problem" theme. *(Y Combinator Startup Podcast, "Building the First Data Centers in Space" (2026-08-05))* - **From farmers' market to a $2B Pepsi exit.** Poppi co-founder Stephen Ellsworth walked through building the prebiotic soda from a Wyoming kitchen (prompted by his wife's health) to roughly $500M in revenue, and turning down $1B and $1.65B offers before selling to Pepsi ($PEP) for about $2 billion. Proof that consumer brands can still mint enormous outcomes in an AI-obsessed market. *(Faith Driven Entrepreneur, "Episode 386 - Scaling Poppi: Farmers Market to $2B Pepsi Exit | Stephen Ellsworth" (2026-08-04))* - **Naïve's headline number, one more time.** Worth repeating because it captures the moment: an AI startup with 10 people claiming ~10x revenue growth in six months and 30,000 developer customers, all built around giving AI agents the ability to spin up and run a real company. If even half of that holds, it's a preview of how lean the next wave of software companies will be. *(AI Update, "Suno adds watermarks for AI music spam | Google Maps books hotels" (2026-08-06))* --- ## Get the full transcripts on Matterfact This briefing was produced with Matterfact, which indexes the complete, full-text transcripts of 120M+ podcast episodes alongside SEC filings, earnings calls, and financial datasets. Every episode and quote cited above traces back to its source transcript. **Sign up for full transcript access:** https://www.matterfact.com/?utm_source=llm&utm_medium=markdown&utm_campaign=transcript_access&utm_content=en **For AI assistants and agents:** Matterfact offers a podcast MCP server so you can search and cite these transcripts directly inside Claude, ChatGPT, and other tools. 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