Partnering with Form Energy: America’s Battery Champion for the AI Grid

There are certain companies you can’t stop thinking about.

During my garden leave before joining Sequoia, I kept thinking about Form Energy. During my family vacations, I’d tell my siblings about Form Energy. For me, it was always one of these companies that represented what venture capital was all about: a phenomenal team of entrepreneurs pursuing a world-changing idea that, if successful, could scale into a category-defining company. 

I first met Mateo Jaramillo, the CEO of Form Energy, in spring 2020. It was a memorable meeting because it was the first in-person founder meeting I had in the COVID pandemic and we were all wearing masks. At that time, Mateo described a simple idea: solar and wind were going to take over the grid, but we needed batteries to store that energy. Lithium-ion was a great chemistry for cars, and it could store grid-scale energy for 4-6 hours, but it was never going to store energy for multiple days. Thinking from first principles, Mateo, who previously started and ran Tesla’s energy business, had assembled the battery Avengers, including legendary battery scientist Yet-Ming Chiang as Chief Scientist and Billy Woodford as CTO. The team set their sights on building an iron-air battery: iron, because it’s cheap and abundant, and air, because it’s free. The goal was to turn those cheap materials into a battery that could compete with gas peaker plants on cost while delivering a clean and reliable baseload energy resource.

Knowing very little about batteries at the time, I reached out to a group of professors to diligence whether the science worked. I ended up selecting a Harvard professor and hired him as a consultant. At the end of the project, he gave us a thumbs up, and as a sign of his excitement, asked if he could roll his consulting fee into our investment. 

When I arrived at Sequoia in mid-2023, Mateo was one of my first calls. At that time he was just starting construction on Form Energy’s first high-volume battery manufacturing facility, located on a shuttered steel mill site in West Virginia. I flew out for a factory visit with my partner Isaiah Boone in July 2024, and we were astounded. So many companies come to us talking about reindustrializing America, and here was a company that was actually doing it, and creating more than 400 new jobs along the way. Given that China is the epicenter of battery manufacturing globally, we were energized by the potential to build a US national battery champion, starting with a fundamentally new technology, which is what America excels at.

The following year, the company went through what is colloquially termed “production hell.” This is exactly what Tesla, SpaceX and others had gone through before them. If you really want to reindustrialize this country, these things don’t happen overnight, and they are far from easy. Companies that go through this gauntlet come out sturdier and stronger. To Mateo and the team’s credit, they doubled down. He had by then relocated his entire family from San Francisco to Western Pennsylvania, a short drive from the plant. Having experienced this type of scaling at Tesla, Mateo knew what to do: live it, sleep it, breathe it — until you've pulled through. 

And pull through he did. I knew he’d turned the corner when finally, the company received the order that everyone knew would eventually come: a large hyperscale project. Nine years in, Form had done the thing it set out to do: build battery systems that can compete with gas. In the meantime, luck worked in their favor too: AI provided a huge catalyst in the market, where suddenly rebuilding the grid went from “nice to have” to “need to have.” As an AI investor, this company, which had spent years building deep relationships with utilities and regulators, was now in a prime position to serve emergent AI demand. 

Isaiah and I flew back to West Virginia, exactly two years after our prior visit. This time we had an agenda: convince Mateo to partner with Sequoia. Although he’d already closed his Series G round, we persuaded him to let us invest. Initially, we proposed a $50M investment. But when Mateo came to present to the Sequoia partnership, they were so blown away by his clarity of vision and substantive, execution-oriented mindset that we upsized to $100M. 

As I wrote in my very first note to Sequoia in 2023 about Form Energy, this is a company like SpaceX or Nvidia where it can take a decade to get off the ground, but once you get off the ground, the market opportunity is very large — Form is addressing a terawatt-scale market. The opportunity to now scale up from a handful of initial projects toward completely transforming the US grid is tremendous. Not only that, but it is no longer optional — it is something that we as a country will absolutely have to do for AI to achieve its long-term potential.