theCUBE + NYSE Wired: The AI Factory - Data Center of the Future | Justin Lopas, Base Power

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Justin Lopas, Base Power

In this segment from theCUBE + NYSE Wired’s “AI Factories – Data Centers of the Future” series, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante sits down with Rob Biederman, managing partner at Asymmetric Capital, to unpack a disciplined approach to early-stage investing amid AI-scale infrastructure shifts. Biederman explains Asymmetric’s founder-first model: writing $1–$10M checks (often via SAFEs), joining boards as they form and helping operators with go-to-market, operations, finance and strategy (not product/engineering). He shares why the firm avoided 2021’s lofty SaaS multiples in favor of backing proven builders earlier (single-digit pre-money), and highlights portfolio execution such as a cash-efficient LATAM e-commerce company scaling from ~$1-2M to about $50M in revenue. The discussion also explores Asymmetric’s subscale buy-and-build plays (e.g., pool cleaning in San Diego, sleep apnea clinics in Houston), where density, tech-enabled services and platform ops expand margins and enterprise value. Biederman weighs in on AI economics as enterprises race to “AI factories,” cautioning that not every AI workload creates ROI and that overbuilt compute assumptions could face a reckoning. He argues that winners will prove a clear 10× value equation and avoid scaling go-to-market before product-market fit. Additional insights include early liquidity discipline (returning $0.20 on the dollar before the fund’s third anniversary), portfolio survivability (34 of 35 companies still operating; three positive exits), and guidance to founders: make your value proposition relevant, credible and differentiated. Tune in for candid perspective on how capital efficiency, ownership discipline and anti-thematic sourcing intersect with a world where GPU-dense data centers and AI-scale software are reshaping enterprise infrastructure and economics.

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More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: The AI Factory - Data Center of the Future

Justin Lopas

Co-Founder & COO

Base Power

play_circle_outline Base Power’s Distributed Residential Batteries: Company-Owned Systems Deliver Backup Power and Grid Services

play_circle_outline Deploying Small Co-located Edge Energy Systems to Avoid Interconnection Queues

play_circle_outline Fleet-Scale Battery Management: Geospatial-Temporal Dispatch and Market Integration for Utilities and Texas Retail Providers

play_circle_outline Rapid growth across Texas: Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso.

play_circle_outline Homeowner benefits: lower bills (10–20% typical) and day-plus backup reliability.

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Justin Lopas, Base Power

Justin Lopas

Co-Founder & COO Base Power

In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: AI Factories - Data Centers of the Future, Justin Lopas, co-founder and chief operating officer of Base Power, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how distributed battery networks installed on single-family homes are solving the grid's critical energy delivery bottleneck. Lopas explains how Base Power designs and manufactures batteries in Austin, Texas, then installs and operates them on homes to shave peak demand and fill usage valleys — unlocking stranded capacity already sitting on the existing grid. With ov... Read more

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What does your company do, how did it come together, and what problem are you trying to solve? add

What problem did you identify with grid interconnection, and how is your company's technology addressing it? add

How do you provide and operate your battery systems — do you own and control the batteries and act as a managed power supplier for homeowners and utilities in deregulated and regulated markets? add

Is the company's focus currently limited to Texas? add

Do you sell your home energy/backup system on an individual home-by-home basis or as bundled packages, and how does that sales model work (who buys it, what does it cost compared with traditional backup, and what savings or backup benefits do homeowners get)? add

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Justin Lopas, Base Power

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John Furrier

>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE Studio here at New York Stock Exchange, of course, it's theCUBE NYSE Wired programs, a CUBE original. We got our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Technology and money, capital markets. Technology is the market. This is our AI Factory series, where we explore the future leaders of AI and people making the news, making the technology and driving this transformational change as real world and digital come together. Justin Lopas is the co-founder and COO of Base Power, along with Zach Dell. Guys, congratulations, Justin. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate you taking the time.

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah, thanks for having me. This is awesome.

John Furrier

>> You guys are in an area that is probably the most talked about topic that five years ago, no one was talking about. Now, AI factories, the AI generation's here, it's bounded by power and that's the top-line story that everyone's talking about, but power has been a crisis. Talk about what you guys are doing at your company, how it came together and problem that you're solving.

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah, thank you very much for having me. So, Base Power is we're based in Austin, Texas. We operate throughout the state of Texas, and soon to be in other states. And what we're doing is we're building a modern version of a distributed power plant. So, the way it works is we design and manufacture batteries in our factory in Austin. We then install them ourselves on single family homes. So, these are the size of roughly an air conditioning unit you'd see on the side of a single family home. And then, we continue to own and operate those batteries and we use them to support the grid when the grid's up and running by adding capacity, charging when there's abundant energy, discharging when there's a shortage. And then, we also sell power to customers in one of our business segments. And the other, we partner with utilities where we offer the batteries as capacity to those utilities. So, we have batteries throughout the grid, on the distribution grid at the edge, co-located with the load. And we think this is the most effective and the fastest way to get energy storage onto the grid. We are the fastest-growing and fastest-deploying battery storage developer in Texas today.

John Furrier

>> What was the idea? What was the origination story? Did they just come to you as, "Hey, we can tackle this problem"? Was it one of those things you saw the opportunity and said, "Hey, this is a gap that needs to be filled"? What was the motivation? What was the inspiration?

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah. So, maybe a little bit of quick personal history as this leads in and how I met my co-founder and all that. So, I'm originally from the Detroit area and I'm a mechanical engineer by background was at SpaceX and Anduril, a defense technology company before. And really focused on both of those companies, in particular Anduril is disrupting an existing industry that's dominated by legacy players. And what my co-founder Zach and I saw is the interest and ability for us to do something similar in the energy space. Zach was looking at investing in batteries. He was on the finance and investing side at Thrive Capital. I was at Anduril, leading manufacturing for them. And we had met when Anduril was raising capital and Thrive was participating. And he had this interest in batteries. I had this interest in manufacturing. We were both interested in the grid and energy and utilities and how the whole system works. And we iterated back and forth in this idea for many months before we both decided to quit our jobs and start the company. We just think that there's a really big opportunity here. And this was before energy became cool again. This was a handful of years ago, three years ago. And now, energy is dominating the conversation, as you mentioned. I think that the conversation really though has been dominated by generation, making the electricity, making the electrons, so to speak, but really is not focused enough on delivering the electrons. And what really matters at the end of the day for an AI data center factory, an EV, any user of electricity is delivering that electricity. And the cost and all of the challenges in delivering the electricity is really what we're focused on.

John Furrier

>> I love the entrepreneurial story because I think it points to opportunity recognition, but also how things get done. Anduril and SpaceX, talk about disrupting legacy businesses, SpaceX to NASA, Anduril in the defense area. There is so much legacy in power. Talk about that. How did you guys think about that when you looked at putting it together? Okay, you come together, "Let's go after this opportunity. It's some technical problems to solve." You have a legacy installed base, you got the grid, you got homes. What was the approach? What was the secret sauce? What made it work for you guys?

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah. So, we looked at this really from a technology perspective first and foremost. Like I said, as my background's in engineering and we wanted to build a company that built technology and operations to then support the existing companies and infrastructure that operate the grid of the utilities today. And what we really focused on was, look, there's a really long queue, it's called the interconnection queue, to get basically plugged into the grid, so to speak, for either a load, like a data center or a generator, like a nuclear power plant or solar farm or whatever. And all of that happens in these very large scales. For batteries, it's typically think tens of shipping containers and some farmland somewhere in the middle of nowhere where batteries get plugged into the grid. These take many, many years. But when you get them plugged in and turned on, you have hundreds of megawatts available. What we identified was a gap in the market, which is there's a lot of interconnection capacity, it's just in small pieces at the edge of the grid. It's on homes, it's on small businesses. And so, that's really the technology we're building is a high quantity of small systems, in this case batteries, energy storage systems that are plugged into the edge of the grid, co-located with the load, such that you can both affect demand and supply. And you don't have to wait in these long queues to get plugged into the grid and build a bunch of new grid to get energy in and out of the battery in that shipping container battery size.

John Furrier

>> I scoped the scale of this because I was just at Mobile Congress, MWC, they call it now. And I looked at the network maps of Verizon and AT&T Wireless, and there's like so much capacity being wasted. Some people call it dormant energy, abandoned energy, whatever the term you use. But essentially, if you aggregate all that energy up, they're sitting on like 200,000 GPU potential power opportunity. That would have been a monster data center, would have taken billions to build. And so, if they retrofit that, they now have a distributed collection. So, the next question, how do you move it? So, that brings me up to the whole distributed energy piece because you've got homes, there's businesses. So, essentially, it's a distributed architecture.

Justin Lopas

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> And the delivery seems to be the secret sauce for you guys. So, explain that for folks because I mean, some people can't really the system aspect of this.

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah. If you go and go walk around any neighborhood in America, you see typically above ground, poles and wires. And if you look at any given wire on either the transmission grid, think the large scale running next to the highway grid or the pole near your house, that wire is on averaged used under 50% of its capacity. So, if you're not home and you're at work, your home is running between one and five kilowatts typically. These are just numbers to give you some sense. However, that home has a capacity of 20, 30 or 40 kilowatts to be pulled from the grid. So, the wire between your home and the transformer, between that transformer and the substation and between that substation and others is heavily underutilized. However, what really matters is peak capacity. So, really, the only thing that truly matters to sizing the grid is when everyone comes home at 5:00 PM, plugs in their EV, turns on their oven and air conditioner, now everybody's pulling that 10, 20, 30 kilowatts. So, the grid is built for peak, but for the most part, peak doesn't happen. Peak happens one second every year by definition. And so, what we do with a network of distributed batteries is we're able to shave the peaks down and increase the valleys. So, if you look at a graph of demand throughout a day, you have a high point and a low point, we reduce the high and we increase the low, such that the utilization of the existing system, that stranded capacity on the grid, so to speak, is utilized. Like I said, we have more of a deliverability, more of a grid infrastructure problem than we do a total generation problem.

John Furrier

>> It's a delivery problem, that's the core focus?

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah, and I mean, that's our core focus. Not to say that generation is not important. We need a lot more of it. We need it closer to where it is being used, but really our core focus today as a company is the deliverability problem.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, I just put out a research report for MWC, just flew in last night from Barcelona called the Hyperconverged Edge. And one of the thesis was is that if you have AI intelligence in the network, you then can do different things. You're kind of going down that same path. So, I have to ask you, and not to conjure up NVIDIA again, but NVIDIA has been saying for over a decade, "We're not in the hardware business, we're in the software business." And people are like, "Ah, what do you mean, you sell GPUs?" Of course, they sell chips, but they bet on CUDA, they bet on software, but it was always the system.

Justin Lopas

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> Take us through your thoughts because what I see here is that you guys are saying, "Hey, let's knock down the physical plant," AKA the home. "Let's use the batteries so you can offload storage, intelligent node." Take us through how you would think about this from a software architecture standpoint, because what you're doing is essentially giving the grid relief.

Justin Lopas

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> But then, power using intelligence, I'm imagining software to route, change, shift, manage peak loads, heat waves. Is that right?

Justin Lopas

>> That's right. That's right. A large portion of our technology stack outside of the physical nature of the battery and the power electronics and the interconnection and such is the software. So, we have a whole software team that has built a whole stack of software that manages the distributed nature of the fleet. This is actually not an easy technical problem to solve. We've got tens of thousands of batteries on the grid and we need to have an understanding of what they're doing at all times, be able to command and control them and to do it with high reliability. This maybe sounds easier than it actually is, and we've built a whole software stack to do that. And so, this allows us for the batteries that we own. So, we operate in both the deregulated and regulated markets. In the deregulated markets where we own and control the batteries, we're able to control one battery, we're able to control a small subset of batteries, we're able to control a substation's worth of batteries or all of them together, and we can locationally dispatch them. So, if Houston, for example, we have a lot of batteries in Houston, needs power, we could be discharging, but Dallas has excess, we're charging. And so, we can manage that whole fleet. For our regulated utility partners, they can manage it. We can control it on their behalf or they have control over it. And they can do the same thing, they can command one battery, they can command a group or they can command all of them. And that whole software stack really allows us to geospatially and temporally over time affect how the grid is utilized.

John Furrier

>> You're a managed power supplier, basically?

Justin Lopas

>> That's right. That's right.

John Furrier

>> You're managing either for yourselves and... So, their option. So, it's not like you're going out to utilities, saying, "Hey, we're going to disrupt you." You're actually helping them?

Justin Lopas

>> Oh, totally. Totally. Utility are our partners. That's right. Yeah, maybe it's worth mentioning. So, we have two go-to-market motions today in what's called deregulated market where you can choose your power provider. This is Houston and Dallas and North Austin and other parts of Texas. We sell power, so we're a retail electric provider is what it's called. Meaning that if you live in a house in Houston, you pay us for your electricity as you sign up with us with our service and we give you a battery. You don't own the battery. We continue to own the battery, but then we control it to offset your costs and lower your electricity bill. So, the benefit to the homeowner is affordable and reliable power. That's the deregulated market. Now, in the regulated market, we partner with utilities. Utilities are our partners. And in those markets, as we just recently announced actually today with CoServ up in the Dallas area, a few weeks ago with El Paso Electric, obviously, in West Texas, in those markets, the utilities either own or they contract with us for the capacity in those batteries and then they can control the batteries through our software. So, we give them tools to manage their infrastructure using our hardware and the financial relationship is either they acquire them or that we own them and they pay us a-

John Furrier

>> So, for them, it's another club in their bag, so to speak, to use a golf analogy?

Justin Lopas

>> That's right. That's right. It's another tool in the tool chest, another club in the bag. Exactly.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the home deployment. What's been the reaction? It's a truck roll, obviously. You got to do an installation. What's been the feedback? What's the economics look like? Take us through the provisioning and installation side.

Justin Lopas

>> This is something that I personally and our team spends an enormous amount of time thinking about and operating around. Building a large grid-scale battery that's shipping container size is a big construction project and it's kind of a one-off thing. It's unique to that specific site. The approach that we've taken, I should say, is that we think about this like a factory. We do over 100 of these things a day now. It has to be repeatable, the same every time. We have to have really good tools and training for our electricians and technicians, and we have to be very efficient in doing it. And so, we've turned this deployment motion, we call it as basically a factory in the field. How do we go with our van and our electricians? We arrive at the house. How long does it take in NASCAR pit stop style from leave the van to get back in the van and it's installed and ready to go.

John Furrier

>> So, a lot of operational metrics?

Justin Lopas

>> A lot of operational-

John Furrier

>> Throughput, installation, efficiency. And of course, once it gets online, there's management software looking at everything.

Justin Lopas

>> Exactly. And so, a lot of the software that we've built, besides the software that manages their fleet of batteries, is software that enables our people in the field to do their best work, to schedule the crews, to make sure they're in the right spot, to commission or turn on and make sure the hardware works, all of that. And so, this whole operation, honestly, I think that's a large part of what we do. Our core IP is around the battery, the power electronics and the software that manages it. And then, it's also the operations to go deploy all these in the tens of thousands and the hundreds per day.

John Furrier

>> I got to ask you about the capital markets. This is a venture that's bold, relevant. I mean, technically it's cool as well. I mean, so everyone's talking about power. What was it like on the capital? Was the reaction like, "We get it." Was there pushback? How did you guys manage that process? Obviously, you broke through, you guys have great momentum. What was it like raising money, putting this together? As you put the team together, were there naysayers? Were there skeptics? "It'll never work." What was-

Justin Lopas

>> Well, of course. There was, of course, naysayers and skeptics. If everyone said it was a good idea, then it probably is already too crowded of a field, right? So, yeah, I think we've been very fortunate to work with some of the best capital partners in the world through our most recent fundraise a few months ago, the Series C. We've just been very fortunate to have really great partners by our side on the capital markets. To your point, energy is now cool again. It was less cool before when we started, and certainly even earlier than that, but it's obvious to everyone now or most people that energy really is the bottleneck. And the grid in particular, as we believe, is really the bottleneck to energy. The energy is the bottleneck to AI and AI is really the big focus point now from a capital markets perspective. So, yeah, look, we've been fortunate to have great partners and as we've built the business and we've announced more partnerships with utilities and we've got more and more homeowners onboard and expanded outside of Texas, we've been very fortunate to just have so much support.

John Furrier

>> I got to ask about this momentum. Can you share some stats on some of the recent momentum? You said you guys are growing very fast.

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Clearly the beachhead has knocked the homes down. What's the appetite for adjacencies, business, data centers? What's the vision and go-to-market appetite?

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah, certainly. We're interested in expanding our product portfolio, going both upstreams or upsize, so to speak, as well as into other products in the home. Nothing to announce there in particular right now, but really, today we're focused on partnering with our utility partners and being the best energy retailer that we possibly can for our homeowners in Texas and beyond and expanding outside of Texas. We want to be an energy platform company eventually as we grow at the end of the day. And so, that's what we're building now with this distributed power plant using batteries, but certainly, it's not the last product-

John Furrier

>> You guys are exclusively in Texas right now only? Is the focus today regional?

Justin Lopas

>> That's right. That's really the focus today is Texas. We're basically all over the state now. We're as far west as El Paso, we're in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, et cetera.

John Furrier

>> What's been the reaction? Share some stories around either the homeowners or just some anecdotal revelations like our people, "Thank you so much for doing this." What's been the reaction? What's surprised you the most?

Justin Lopas

>> Oh, certainly. I mean, look, power is not a nice to have, it is a need to have, especially in the modern era. But look, people have kids, they have things that they're doing at their home and they need power and they need that power to be reliable. And unfortunately, in some cases, that power is not reliable, especially just because of storms along the Houston coast, et cetera. And so, we have had countless, countless stories of folks that would have lost power, but were actually backed up by the home. And also the money that we're saving folks, they're able to go spend in other ways. We're able to lower costs for homeowners and add reliability. And so, this has been, honestly, the perception from our homeowners, our members, our customers, has been fantastic and we're so, so thankful for this .

John Furrier

>> Are you guys doing deals on an individual home basis? Is there bundled package? How does that work?

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah. So, as I was mentioning, there's really two go-to-markets. So, there's the direct-to-consumer deregulated market where it's home by home and individuals either get a referral or they see an ad or they know from a neighbor and they sign up and they come to our-

John Furrier

>> What's the motivation for that group, power outage, air conditioning? Texas obviously gets hot.

Justin Lopas

>> It does get hot.

John Furrier

>> So, air conditioning is always putting pressure on the grid. Is that they know the need and they're proactively motivated?

Justin Lopas

>> Some are. Yeah, some are. So, a lot of people have been, frankly, have been priced out of the backup market, right? Backup historically has been a luxury good that is cost what a used or new car would, tens of thousands of dollars if you're going to go buy a battery or a generator for your home. Our offering today is only a few hundred dollars because of this ownership model. And so, folks that have been priced out of the backup market that are interested in the resiliency solution that have been through winter or summer storms or outages are coming to us just because they're interested. And then, other folks are just looking for more affordable power, which we can also offer via this model. And then, look, what we find oftentimes is one person in a neighborhood gets the system, they walk around the neighborhood, it's like, "Oh, what's that white box that we're installing next to the house?" And then, the neighbors talk and then everyone suddenly in the neighborhood-

John Furrier

>> Word gets out fast....

Justin Lopas

>> is signing up.

John Furrier

>> And are they saving money, better throughput? What's the vanity metric or metric for the homeowner?

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah. So, typically, we're saving 10% to 20% on the monthly bill for the homeowner based on what the market is at the time. And then, we're also able to back them up for a day plus typically with the backup.

John Furrier

>> Well, it's been great to watch you guys when you guys formed this. I love the vision, the mission. Congratulations on the momentum. Final question, what's the coolest thing that you guys are working on right now? If you had to share a favorite project or technology, what is a cool thing? Share something that's super cool that's going on.

Justin Lopas

>> Cool and unannounced, unfortunately are-

John Furrier

>> Cool and announced?

Justin Lopas

>> Cool and announced-

John Furrier

>> You can show a little direction, you're not a public company.

Justin Lopas

>> No, fair enough. Yeah. I think that one of the coolest things that we're working on today is our factories. So, we've built and are now operating a facility out of the old Austin American Statesman building. This is the old printing press in downtown Austin for those who are familiar and we're operating a factory there, where we're building batteries and power electronics. And those batteries are then going to support homeowners in the hundreds per day. And so, I think that's like, at least to me, one of the coolest things. But I'll be honest with you, the software, the hardware development, the installation motion, all the partnerships with utilities, the CoServ partnership that we just announced this morning, the El Paso partnership, the Guadalupe Valley Electric Co-op partnership we announced many months ago. These are all really cool too. So, it's hard to pick a favorite, but .

John Furrier

>> And it's a lot of co-design. I mean, I think the trend that I'm seeing in this AI era where you have intelligent software is that a lot of the go to-market engineering is co-design based. So, you have a lot of stakeholders in your deal.

Justin Lopas

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> And the AI Factory series we're doing talks a lot about data spends, but now the edge is coming online, the network, but you're at the home, that's an ultimate edge node. So, they'll be tokenized. So, these are potential factory beachheads. So, the NVIDIAs of the world are going to love that because if I'm a homeowner, I might want to have robotics in the home. I want to have everything tokenized, intelligence, whether it's decentralized tokens or actually AI tokens for intelligence.

Justin Lopas

>> Yeah. Look, our view is that AI is clearly the future, is one of the most important technologies, if not the most important technology that we here in America are building. And energy is the feedstock for AI and we need more of it and more ability to deliver it. And that's really what we're focused on, is delivering energy.

John Furrier

>> You're enabling homes. You're solving a need now with energy, get the cost savings, but the future is just a lot of headroom for the homeowner.

Justin Lopas

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> As the AI-native companies start coming online with services, a revenue model kicks in.

Justin Lopas

>> And it's not even just AI. I mean, that's obviously the talking point today, but electrification of heating and cooling in homes is a big new draw on the grid as well as electric vehicles. Electric vehicle will take two or three times the load of a home just overnight by getting an EV. So, anyways, there's a lot of trends that are increasing demand more than just AI.

John Furrier

>> Real-world assets on chain has become one of the toughest part of our crypto series, our other most popular show, Crypto Trailblazers. And there's some entrepreneurs out there who are putting energy in on the blockchain. So, if someone's really good potentially at managing their energy, they could tokenize their energy. Is that way out there? Is that...

Justin Lopas

>> Not something that we're thinking about at the moment. We'll leave that to the folks that are in the crypto industry. But no, there's so much innovation happening in this space.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, it's a really great opportunity. So, much ahead of you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing the story. Congratulations to you and Zach. Zach Dell, good friend of theCUBE. Michael Dell's been on many times, so shout out to Zach and the team. Thanks for coming on, Justin.

Justin Lopas

>> Great. Thank you.

John Furrier

>> All right. I'm John Furrier. This is our AI Factory series. We explore the leaders who are making it happen in AI. And the energy is bounding all the functions, but we're seeing it both on the crypto infrastructure as well as AI, but ultimately, the edge, the home, the energy will enable a lot of new things and solve real-world problems with the grid and delivering energy around it at a real-time basis, the software will control it. This is John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.