Texas Weekly Deal Highlights
August 9, 2026
Happy Sunday!
Base Power’s $1 billion Series C last October was one of the biggest Texas deals of the past ten years. This week, the company did it again, raising another $1 billion in a Series D that values it at $13 billion, roughly four times what it was worth ten months ago.
The company’s model is an interesting one. Base Power installs a home battery for a low upfront fee and a monthly membership, but it keeps ownership of the hardware, linking thousands of these batteries into a single fleet it can dispatch to the grid when demand spikes. (And we all remember what can happen when demand spikes.)
Customers get backup power when the lights go out, and Base Power gets a distributed power plant it can sell into the Texas market. This week it also began manufacturing its own battery, Base Core, at an Austin factory now turning out thousands of units a month.
That model puts Base Power in the middle of the Texas energy conversation. The state’s grid has strained for years to keep up with a growing population and increasingly extreme weather, and the demand coming from data centers and electrification will only add to the pressure. Base Power is betting that part of the answer lies in a decentralized network of home batteries that can store power and feed it back when the grid runs short.
This week’s full roundup follows an update from pH Partners on Function Health, whose celeb-backed raises we have covered in the past.
Function Health: $450M Non-Dilutive Growth Financing
Late last month, General Catalyst (GC) committed $450M to Function Health through its Customer Value Fund, the largest check the health-testing platform has taken to date. This raise does not result in a new valuation for Function Health. Instead, General Catalyst gets repaid out of the revenue its capital helps generate, effectively underwriting Function’s customer acquisition engine rather than pricing the company itself.
The $450M comes from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), GC’s non-dilutive vehicle that pre-funds a company’s sales and marketing spend and gets repaid, on a capped basis, only from the revenue that spend generates, functioning more like revenue-based financing than equity. This round comes eight months after Function’s $298M Series B, led by Redpoint Ventures at a $2.5B valuation (Nov. 2025), and follows two 2026 tuck-ins: Getlabs (nationwide mobile phlebotomy/at-home blood draw network, acquired April 2026) and SuppCo (supplement verification platform with a TrustScore system covering 35,000+ products, acquired May 2026). Total capital raised to date exceeds $800M since Function’s 2023 beta launch.
CVF only underwrites companies that have already proven product-market fit and predictable CAC payback making it a tool for scaling a working model. The investor is effectively underwriting the efficiency of Function’s customer acquisition engine, and by choosing CVF over another equity round also lets Function keep scaling without putting a fresh price tag on the company at a moment when the category’s comps are getting noisier.
GC has used CVF to finance 40+ companies, deploying nine figures a month; other recent CVF deals include $1B for Prenetics’ IM8 (financing up to 70% of marketing spend) and $360M for Musely. On Function’s side: 500,000+ members, 100M+ completed lab tests since 2023, and a membership price that already dropped from $499 to $365/year at the Series B.
Function’s language stays consumer-wellness even as its acquisitions steadily assemble clinical-grade infrastructure: imaging (Ezra), logistics (Getlabs), and an intervention layer (SuppCo). The positioning bet is that owning the full stack (measure, deliver, act) is the differentiator for this rapidly growing category. That’s a contrast with rival Superpower, which has competed mainly on price ($199/year vs. Function’s $365).
The nearest comps are Superpower ($51M raised total, sub-$300M valuation, priced down to $199/year), Prenuvo (full-body MRI, ~$70M raised), and Neko Health. Function has made three acquisitions in 15 months, all vertically stacking rather than horizontally scaling, a category-consolidator approach rather than a multi-player field. Worth watching: CVF is becoming a repeat financing tool for consumer subscription health and wellness leaders with proven CAC economics (Function, IM8) rather than a one-off, a sign the category’s biggest players may increasingly skip traditional equity rounds altogether.
Because GC only gets repaid if the financed CAC spend converts, the thesis will depend on whether Getlabs and SuppCo turn from press-release synergy into real retention and upsell revenue over the next few quarters. Watch for membership growth past 500K, a disclosed revenue run-rate, and whether the Superpower litigation resolves in a way that sets a category-defining precedent on what counts as a “biomarker.”
—Analysis by the pH Partners Team
pH Partners is an Austin-based boutique investment bank focused on Healthcare, Technology, and Consumer markets. Learn more at phpartners.com.
Austin
Base Power, a provider of home battery systems and distributed energy services, raised $1B in a Series D co-led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase with participation from Altimeter, D1 Capital Partners, and others. $2.28B raised to date.
ClearJet, a provider of middle-mile air freight infrastructure for e-commerce parcel delivery, raised $24.28M in a deal from undisclosed investors. $38.63M raised to date.
PulseForge, a developer of photonic thermal processing equipment for semiconductor and electronics manufacturing, raised $16M in a deal from undisclosed investors. $16M raised to date.
BioGene Therapeutics, a developer of gene therapies and lipid nanoparticle treatments for metabolic disorders, raised $4.8M in a Seed from undisclosed investors. $4.80M raised to date.
INNOVOTEX, a developer of texaphyrin-based oncology therapeutics targeting platinum-resistant solid tumors, raised $4M in a Seed led by Keiretsu Forum. $4.83M raised to date.
Greater Texas Market
Mariana Minerals (Houston/San Francisco), a developer of software-driven mines and refineries producing copper, lithium, and nickel, raised $310M in a Series B led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, BHP Ventures, Breakthrough Energy, and others. $393.53M raised to date.
Texas Stock Exchange (Dallas), a provider of a national securities exchange for equities listing and trading, raised $27.90M in a deal from undisclosed investors. $434.12M raised to date.
Critical Materials Group (Talpa), a manufacturer of energetic materials for domestic defense munitions production, raised $7.80M in a Seed from undisclosed investors. $7.80M raised to date.
See you next week!
—Mason & Joel
This edition was supported by Malik Osumah.
Subscribe to Joel Trammell’s CEO Newsletter, Managing the Future.