Fresh off a nearly $95 million funding raise, Viridi Parente has ramped up growth this year and doesn’t plan to slow down.
The business, located at 1001 East Delevan Ave., Buffalo, has developed both fixed and portable lithium-ion battery storage packs that are capable of storing renewable energy with fail-safe technology for the battery storage system.
The company closed late last year a $94.69 million round of Series C funding, which will help Viridi Parente scale for years to come.
This year, the business completed a $10 million renovation project that increased its occupied square footage by about 50,000 square feet, according to CEO and founder Jon Williams. That brings the company’s total square footage to roughly 180,000 of the available 850,000.
But Williams’ isn’t stopping there. His goal is to occupy the entire 42-acre campus on the East Side. The business is working on the design of its next expansion, which will include implementing automation technology to ramp up production.
The automation machinery is already configured and the business is going through initial testing. Williams expects the machines to be ready to order by April. The timeline for implementing the technology hasn't been determined.
Currently, it takes the company about 30 labor hours to build a battery storage pack. With automation, it’ll take about 20 minutes.
“At this point, now that the pack is tested and validated, scale comes from optimizing the assembly of that pack,” he said. “So today everything we’re doing is designing the production methodology for manufacturing thousands instead of hundreds.”
The business recently landed a “substantial customer” for its portable battery system technology. Williams declined to give details at this point.
Viridi Parente has more orders than it can make for 2023. Each automated production line the company adds can manufacture about 10,000 packs annually, which equates to about $250 million in sales.
The business has also grown its team from about 60 in January to about 130 this month. Locally, employee count jumped from 40 to over 100. (The employer also has workers in China and Boulder, Colorado.)
Williams expects to exceed 200 employees by the end of 2023 and grow year-over-year revenue by at least 1,000%. After that, he estimates revenue growth would slow down a bit to 500% from 2023 to 2024.
His goals might seem lofty to some, but he’s looking at a wide market potential. Viridi Parente’s battery pack system could apply to everything except automobiles, he said. Even then, the technology could be used to charge cars but just doesn’t go into the actual vehicle.
“It is a massive market,” said Williams. “It is quickly evolving, and I feel that our product is really the ‘Rosetta Stone’ I call it, translating all these different renewable energy sources into use. … The only reason it hasn’t taken off at this point is because it’s not safe and we made it safe.”
