Moment Energy Closes $40 Million Series B Backed by Liberty Mutual, Tokyo Gas, and In-Q-Tel to Scale Second-Life Battery Storage

Moment Energy announced a US$40 million Series B on May 5, lifting total capital raised above US$100 million. Evok Innovations led the round. Liberty Mutual Investments, Tokyo Gas venture arm Acario, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, In-Q-Tel, and W23 Global Fund participated. The proceeds will fund what the company calls the world’s largest second-life battery factory.

The dollar figure is unremarkable for a 2026 storage round. The investor list is not.

The capital stack. Liberty Mutual is one of the largest commercial property and casualty insurers in North America. Acario is the venture arm of Tokyo Gas, a Japanese utility with a long-running portfolio of distributed energy investments. In-Q-Tel is the strategic investment fund tied to the United States intelligence community, with a mandate that prioritizes resilience and supply security over financial return. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund underwrites technologies the company expects to procure at scale across its own footprint. None of these are generalist climate venture funds. Each represents a distinct buyer or risk underwriter for the asset class Moment is selling.

What the company actually does. Moment Energy repurposes used electric-vehicle battery packs into stationary storage systems. CEO Edward Chiang told TechCrunch the strategy targets sites where conventional battery storage is constrained by siting, permitting, or cost. The company holds UL 1974 listing for repurposed batteries and UL 9540A large-scale fire test data for its system. In its press materials, Moment describes itself as the only provider able to deploy second-life battery storage in the built environment without special dispensations, naming data centers, hospitals, factories, and microgrids as target use cases. The company claims a 30-year system life through pack-swap architecture and an effective cycling cost near three cents per kilowatt-hour for industrial users.

Those are the company’s claims, not independently audited figures. The underlying operational data on second-life pack performance over decade-plus deployments is thin across the industry. What is independently verifiable is the certification posture and the customer set the company is positioning toward.

The category being funded. Second-life storage has been pitched for roughly a decade. Most attempts stalled on three problems: cell-grade variability creating warranty exposure, insurer reluctance to underwrite repurposed lithium-ion in occupied buildings, and the absence of a standards regime that authorities having jurisdiction would accept without case-by-case review.

UL 1974, published in 2018 and updated in subsequent revisions, gave repurposers a path to evaluate cell-pack reuse. UL 9540A, the large-scale fire propagation test referenced in the 2024 International Fire Code and the 2026 edition of NFPA 855, gave AHJs a deterministic basis for indoor approvals. The combination is what Moment is now selling against.

The standards path is open to first-life systems as well. Viridi earned a UL 9540 listing for a 480-volt indoor commercial cabinet on April 21. SolarEdge launched a 197 kWh commercial storage cabinet for European peak shaving on April 22. Each represents a different competitive vector into the same indoor-certified commercial slot.

The investor signal. A property-casualty insurer’s venture arm participating in a battery manufacturer is not a financial bet on equity multiples. Liberty Mutual underwrites the buildings these systems are installed in. Its participation indicates the underwriting committee has internalized the certification pathway closely enough to accept the technology in policies it writes. That is a different kind of validation than a clean-tech venture firm provides.

In-Q-Tel’s mandate runs toward dual-use resilience: assets the intelligence community or affiliated agencies might need to procure for hardened sites where outdoor lithium installations are not viable. Tokyo Gas, through Acario, has been mapping the second-life value chain for years; Japanese utilities expect a wave of EV battery returns by 2030 and view repurposing as a structural cost line rather than a venture thesis. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund underwrites companies whose products Amazon expects to buy. The fund participated in Redwood Materials, ZeroAvia, and Infinium under similar logic.

Each of these investors has a reason to want this technology to exist that is not contingent on the equity returning a venture multiple. That is rare in a 2026 storage round and is the operative fact about the financing.

The competitive geography. Indoor-certified commercial battery storage is now a category with multiple funded entrants, public listings, and standards-anchored permitting paths. The IRC and NFPA 855 references to UL 9540A make it a deterministic process rather than a negotiated one, which compresses sales cycles and reshapes which buyers can be reached economically.

Second-life systems carry a different risk profile than first-life equivalents. State-of-health variability across recovered packs makes warranty design harder. Insurance pricing reflects a thinner actuarial dataset. Bankability for tax-equity-backed projects under Section 48 of the Internal Revenue Code is unsettled, particularly under the FEOC and material assistance cost ratio framework Treasury laid out in Notice 2026-15. Whether repurposed cells originally manufactured by foreign entities of concern carry FEOC exposure for downstream ITC claims is a question the guidance does not yet resolve cleanly.

The Moment financing does not answer those questions. It does indicate that strategic buyers, insurers, and security-focused capital have priced the certification pathway as sufficient to invest behind. That is a category-level signal, regardless of how this specific company performs.

The wider read. Second-life storage has spent a decade as an industry curiosity. Moving from curiosity to a US$100 million capitalized company with insurer, utility, and intelligence-community capital changes the conversation around what counts as bankable supply for indoor commercial battery deployments. The first-life manufacturers that own most of the certified shelf space now face a competitor whose unit economics, if the cycling-cost claims hold under independent audit, will compress on installations where COGS is the binding constraint and rated cycle life is overspecified.

The audit comes next. The capital is in.

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