Ore Energy raises €37.3M Series A for iron-air batteries that run for four days straight

Ore Energy (Amsterdam) has raised €37.3 million ($43 million) in a Series A co-led by Plural and HV Capital, with Positron Ventures also participating. The round brings total capital raised to €53 million — an unusual concentration for a hardware startup at Series A stage. The company was founded in 2023 by Aytac Yilmaz (CEO), Rutil Özdemir (COO), and Yaiza Gonzalez Garcia (CSO).

Plural, which participated in Isometric's €34 million Series A in July as an existing institutional investor, moves into a lead position here — the shift from follower to co-lead within a single month is the sharpest signal of conviction in the syndicate.

The chemistry: rusting iron as a grid battery

Iron-air is not a new concept. What makes Ore Energy's thesis credible is less the electrochemistry than the material economics: its batteries are built from iron, water, and air — all abundant, all cheap, and all sourceable from within a European supply chain without lithium, cobalt, or imported rare earths. The system stores energy by oxidising iron during the charge cycle (essentially rusting it) and reverses the reaction during discharge. Ore Energy says the cells can hold surplus renewable electricity for up to 100 hours before dispatching it back to the grid on demand.

That duration claim sits in a different competitive frame than lithium. Lithium-ion and LFP batteries are optimised for short-duration storage — four hours or fewer. Long-duration storage (eight hours to multiple days) is where iron-air's economics apply: not competing with lithium for residential solar or frequency-regulation markets, but targeting the multi-day mismatches between renewable generation and grid demand that lithium cannot economically bridge. Co-located with wind farms, the batteries capture output that would otherwise be curtailed — making existing generation assets more productive without additional turbines.

The company has signed a 1 GWh commercial agreement with Budget Thuis, a Dutch challenger utility, and has run pilot projects with EDF, the French state power company, demonstrating real-world utility performance.

The market timing: power scarcity as AI's binding constraint

Global electricity demand from data centres is projected to reach 945 TWh by 2030, more than doubling the current level. AI training and inference create large, rapid swings in power draw; firm, dispatchable storage reduces the premium data centre operators pay for reliable grid access and reduces dependence on fossil backup generation. Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, described iron-air as having "the potential to become one of the world's most important energy technologies" — a claim that traces to the view that energy availability, not compute availability, is increasingly the binding constraint on AI infrastructure expansion.

The Series A funds Ore Energy's first manufacturing facility, ahead of a target for gigawatt-hour-scale production in 2028. The critical 18-month gate is not chemistry but cost per MWh at production volume: iron-air's materials cost advantage is real, but electrochemical systems almost always encounter process and yield challenges when controlled lab results meet an industrial floor. Whether Ore Energy's manufacturing learning curve outpaces further lithium battery cost reductions — which have fallen roughly 90% over the past decade — is the question this round opens rather than settles.