No Consumer Deals in Sight: Form Energy Lands $750M as NYC Crowds the Bay Area

The US venture tape on August 12 told a story of its own: a full day of deals without a single consumer round. Capital flowed exclusively into energy, AI infrastructure and biotech, a clear signal of where smart money sees the next decade.

Anchoring the day, Form Energy closed a $750 million Series G led by T. Rowe Price, with new investors including Sequoia Capital, Janus Henderson and Franklin Templeton. The company, which has now raised more than $2 billion in equity, builds iron-air batteries capable of storing energy for up to 100 hours. The new capital will scale up manufacturing at its West Virginia plant after its contracted backlog jumped from roughly 20 to 80 gigawatt-hours, driven by data centers' surging appetite for power, with customers including Google and Xcel Energy.

The deeper story came out of New York, where four companies priced rounds in the city on the same day. Blacksmith raised a $45 million Series B at a valuation near $550 million, led by Peak XV, for its cloud platform for code testing; Silicon Data landed $30.5 million to build an independent benchmark and verification layer for AI hardware, with backers including CME Group and Samsung Ventures; Remepy closed $36 million for its hybrid drugs, with its lead Parkinson's program heading into Phase III trials; and Boulevard Bio launched with a $65 million founding round from Deerfield to take on chronic kidney disease with engineered antibodies.

Four deals in one city on one day is no coincidence. It is a statement that New York's company formation rate, in AI infrastructure and biotech in particular, now rivals the Bay Area at Series A and B. The map is shifting, and the money is saying it before the headlines do.

Key terms explained:

Venture capital: Investment in high-risk startups in exchange for equity, betting that a small number of winners will pay for the rest.

Series G: A very late-stage funding round, usually raised shortly before an IPO or sale and typically very large.

Iron-air batteries: Storage built on the controlled rusting and un-rusting of iron; cheaper than lithium but slower, suited to storing power for days rather than hours.

Gigawatt-hour (GWh): A unit of stored or consumed energy, equal to one million kilowatt-hours.

Long-duration storage: The ability to hold and discharge electricity over tens of hours, which grids running on solar and wind need.

Data centres: Facilities housing thousands of servers that run cloud computing and AI, drawing power at rates that rival small cities.