Plural co-leads Ore Energy's $43M Series A funding round
Ore Energy, an Amsterdam and Delft-based energy storage company, has raised $43 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by EstVCA member Plural and HV, with participation from existing investor Positron Ventures, bringing the company's total raised to around $61 million.
Spun out of TU Delft in 2023, Ore Energy was founded by Aytac Yilmaz, its CEO, Rutil Özdemir, its COO, and Yaiza Gonzalez Garcia, its CSO. Yilmaz's academic research into corrosion underpins the company's approach.
Wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to generate electricity but among the most awkward to supply, because grids cannot absorb the power when conditions are good and no widely deployed battery can hold the surplus long enough to release it later. Lithium-ion becomes uneconomical beyond roughly four to eight hours. Europe consequently wastes an estimated 72 TWh of clean electricity every year, then pays to burn gas when the wind drops.
Ore Energy's batteries store electricity by rusting iron and recover it by reversing the reaction. Built from iron, water and air, they use no lithium or cobalt, which means the entire supply chain can sit inside Europe. The systems hold power for up to 100 hours at roughly one tenth the cost per unit of capacity of lithium-ion at that duration, long enough to make a wind farm behave more like a dispatchable plant from a grid operator's perspective.
The company has already moved beyond the laboratory. It has signed a 1 GWh agreement with Dutch utility Budget Thuis, with the first 400 MWh due in 2028, and completed a 100-hour pilot with EDF in France under the EU-backed StoRIES programme.
Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, called long-duration storage one of the biggest unsolved challenges in the energy transition, and said unlocking it will change how Europe powers industry, scales AI data centres and drives economic growth. By getting far more out of every unit of wind already installed, he said, "Ore Energy has the potential to become one of the world's most important energy companies."
The funding will establish Ore Energy's first manufacturing facility and expand its roughly 50-person team across manufacturing, commercial and operational roles, on a path to gigawatt-hour-scale production in 2028.
As AI pushes European electricity demand higher and the continent looks for ways to power data centres without importing gas it does not produce, long-duration storage is becoming an industrial competitiveness question as much as a climate one.
For more information, please visit Plural's investment note.
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