Branch Energy raises $33M Series B

Piva Capital and Clean Energy Ventures led the round, with Active Impact Investments and Whitecap Venture Partners joining, plus existing backers Prelude Ventures, Zero Infinity Partners and Inovia Capital. Branch is targeting data-center demand in Texas and Illinois, within PJM territory. The product is Arc, a self-contained unit about the size of a parking space that installs from a flatbed in about two days. Valuation was not disclosed. The round follows an earlier $10.8 million Series A. The model is a managed service, not a hardware sale. Branch covers upfront capital, permitting, installation, insurance and maintenance. In Texas, it also acts as the host site's retail electricity provider, timing battery charging and discharging against peak and off-peak rates. It dispatches stored energy into wholesale markets at peak demand, or contracts capacity directly to large buyers such as hyperscale data center operators. For AI company builders, the deal shows where compute constraints are pushing capital. US generation projects face median grid-connection queues of more than five years, so distributed, behind-the-meter capacity is becoming a way to get power sooner. Founders planning large training or inference footprints may find more power options, though the distributed storage market is crowded, and Branch's hyperscaler contracts are not yet detailed publicly.