A Richmond storage startup is shutting down and laying off around 250 employees after failing to raise new capital this year.
Moxion Power notified employees on Friday that the company is ceasing operations a week after implementing furloughs, SFGate reported. Its remaining employees will lose their jobs as of August 5, according to a document filed with California state officials.
It's a stunningly quick fall for a company that earlier this year doubled its real estate footprint and was making plans to build a large factory amid bullish growth projections.
"The company has, throughout the first half of 2024 and up to the present, been engaged in serious discussions with investors to obtain financing and has been exploring other corporate options, which, if successful, would have enabled the company to avoid a shutdown and continue its operations. Unfortunately, the company learned in the past few days that it would not be able to obtain the anticipated financing," Moxion's CEO Paul Huelskamp wrote in the filing.
Moxion previously laid off around 100 employees in June.
Representatives for Moxion didn't respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
The company designed and manufactured electric battery power generators that were positioned as a more sustainable alternative to diesel-powered backup generators.
In January, Moxion more than doubled its real estate footprint with a nine-year lease for an additional 101,000 square feet at Ford Point in Richmond, bringing its total leased space to 181,000 square feet.
“The growth that we’re experiencing to the business is faster than we anticipated. We thought that this factory ... would give us enough manufacturing capacity for the next few years … We are in the envious position of that not being the case. We’ve outgrown (Factory 1) in the first year of production," Moxion's Chief Operations Officer Josh Ensign told the Business Times in January.
Just two years after its founding, Moxion was negotiating a lease for 200,000 square feet of industrial space located at the Port of Richmond for a new so-called gigafactory.
The team was also anticipating tripling its workforce to more than 1,000 employees within a few years, co-founder Alex Meek told the Business Times last year.
In April, California announced that it had granted Moxion a $25 million tax credit for expanding its manufacturing capabilities in Richmond and Los Angeles. It was also one of 13 companies selected by the California Energy Commission last year to receive grants for "zero-emission transportation manufacturing" projects.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom visited Moxion's facility in Richmond to highlight the state's commitment to energy-related climate change mitigation efforts via its Clean Energy Transition Plan.
Moxion was attempting to raise $200 million at a $1.5 billion valuation this year, Bloomberg Law reported in February.
That would have tripled the company's total funding, which stood at around $126 million, according to PitchBook. It was valued at $500 million when it raised $100 million in a Series B round two years ago from Tamarack Global, Sunbelt Rentals, The Climate Pledge, Marubeni Ventures, Enterprise Holdings Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Suffolk Technologies, 13Capital, Rocketship.vc, Nugen Capital Management and Microsoft Climate Fund.
"It didn't seem surprising that we didn't close a new round … this is a company that had a product that was technically better than anything else on the market … the most energy-dense storage system,” said an employee who was laid off in June, “but that confidence in the product led to some missteps in assessing the strategy."
South Carolina-based Sunbelt Rentals, which provides heavy equipment and tool rentals, had signed a multiyear deal with Moxion to buy its generators through 2025.
Amazon Studios was also testing out Moxion's battery-powered generators on some productions, the Hollywood Reporter wrote last year.
“(What appealed to us) was the versatility of the solution,” Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund principal Nick Ellis told the Hollywood Reporter. “It can be used in a variety of different applications on set at our warehouses for backup power, or in our data centers for temporary power. And then the zero emission power profile of the unit was unlike anything we’d seen on the market before.”
According to the International Energy Agency, battery storage was the fastest-growing segment within the power and energy technology sector last year.
