{"id":1172,"date":"2026-01-21T02:00:59","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T02:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/?p=1172"},"modified":"2026-01-21T02:01:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T02:01:00","slug":"after-the-spac-why-storage-company-energy-vault-pivoted-after-going-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/2026\/01\/21\/after-the-spac-why-storage-company-energy-vault-pivoted-after-going-public\/","title":{"rendered":"After the SPAC: Why storage company Energy Vault pivoted after going public"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When Energy Vault announced its $300 million preferred equity investment<\/a> from Orion Infrastructure Capital last fall, it appeared to have pulled off what critics and short sellers deemed unlikely: surviving the upheaval that caused many of the companies that went public in the SPAC boom of 2021 and 2022 go bankrupt \u2014 and even managing to secure infrastructure financing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many of its peers, Energy Vault went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in February 2022, five years after its 2017 founding. At the time, the energy storage company had lofty long-duration storage promises. It was pitching a gravity-based system, which used large, automated structures to store energy by hoisting composite blocks into the air, and generate electricity by lowering them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technology was still unproven at scale \u2014 and in fact many critics deemed it economically untenable<\/a> \u2014 but the market didn\u2019t care. Energy Vault was already backed by over $200 million in private funding, including a major Series B from SoftBank<\/a>. The SPAC deal ultimately was valued at over $1 billion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of 2022, however, the company was already starting to put gravity storage to the side<\/a>, expanding their approach to include more conventional short-duration lithium-ion batteries as well. And its stock, which had at one point been above $21, started declining steadily. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In early 2025 \u2014 right as Trump 2.0 jolted the company further with the introduction of new tariffs<\/a> \u2014 Energy Vault told investors that it would start owning and operating assets via long-term off-take agreements, instead of just developing and transferring them to the customer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rob Piconi, Energy Vault\u2019s CEO and chairman, told Latitude Media<\/em> that \u201cinvestors got a little concerned\u201d at the company\u2019s shift. Back in 2024, in the lead-up to its investor announcement, the company had used its own balance sheet to kick-start some of the financing, which meant that their revenue for the year was low; in 2025, therefore, \u201cinvestors were waiting to see how we were going to fund these projects in our pipeline,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In light of the 2025 announcement, the company\u2019s stock price crept below a dollar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But October brought an answer that investors could get on board with: the Orion infrastructure deal, designed to support its new platform for developing, owning, and operating storage assets, called Asset Vault. The announcement, combined with a rebound in revenue and new contracts, led the stock to climb again. Shares are now trading in the $5 to $6 range<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHaving that $300 million gave investors reason to have confidence,\u201d Piconi said, noting that it gave investors clarity on how Energy Vault was going to finance its portfolio. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This four-year evolution embodies the consequences of the energy SPAC\u2019s rise and fall. Energy Vault went from a big valuation and potentially revolutionary, if controversial, idea, to a more standard energy storage business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an alternative to a traditional IPO, SPACs provide a path to the public markets for companies that might otherwise lack access to capital. For climate tech companies trying to bring novel technologies from lab to commercialization \u2014 crossing the so-called \u201cValley of Death\u201d \u2014 they especially appeal in moments of investor cautiousness. And they are seeing a resurgence: In 2025, there were over $22 billion across more than 100 SPAC IPOs, more than the total for 2023 and 2024 combined, according to reporting by Bloomberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The SPAC \u2018pump-and-dump\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At least 69 climate tech companies<\/a> went public through SPAC deals in 2021, according to Sightline Climate. Julian Klymochko, founder of Accelerate Financial Technologies, an investment firm specializing in SPACs, describes the market at the time as being \u201cfrothy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou had a massive desire for highly speculative story stocks coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, so you saw a boom in those types of investment opportunities,\u201d Klymochko said. \u201cBut at the end of the day, they were highly speculative, and\u2026without the capital market support, many could not survive.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after the Energy Vault deal, though, there was a \u201cdramatic change in investors\u2019 preference,\u201d and many of the newly public companies saw their performance crash. At the beginning of 2023, climate tech companies that had gone public through a SPAC were down roughly 70%<\/a> since the start of 2022, according to Sightline, \u201cunderperforming the NASDAQ index by more than 2X.\u201d At that time, Energy Vault\u2019s stock hovered between $3 and $4. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even at their most popular, the speculative nature of the SPAC boom raised many eyebrows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In September 2021, when Energy Vault first announced the SPAC deal, Craig Lawrence, partner and co-founder of Energy Transition Ventures, criticized the move on X<\/a>: \u201cWhat is going on here? Is this how we are going to finance the energy transition? With early investors passing on all the technical and market risk to retail investors, while taking big markups and getting early liquidity?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Michael Barnard, a climate tech consultant who has criticized<\/a> Energy Vault\u2019s original gravity storage technology for being \u201cobviously flawed,\u201d told Latitude Media <\/em>that the company \u201chit the motherlode with a SPAC reverse takeover,\u201d and that \u201cthe clean tech SPAC bubble of the early 2020s functioned like a classic pump-and-dump cycle at the market level.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Energy Vault pushed back on Barnard\u2019s criticisms of the gravity technology, maintaining that it has been \u201cextensively tested and validated,\u201d and is economically viable in certain targeted use cases, \u201cparticularly where long asset life, site-specific conditions, re-use of waste material and avoidance of supply-chain constraints are priorities.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Missing middle\u2019 <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

However, \u200b\u200bKlymochko maintains that the \u201cvoracious market demand\u201d back then meant that SPAC deals still \u201cseemed to be the right move\u201d for many companies. \u201cIf you\u2019re an early stage company, and all of a sudden you can get a $1 billion valuation and raise money off the back of that\u2026 it seemed like a very attractive proposition at the time,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Rob Day, partner and co-founder at climate tech investor Spring Lane Capital, the SPAC\u2019s appeal is the result of the \u201cmissing middle<\/a>\u201d: the financing gap sitting in between venture capital and infrastructure finance, which makes it hard for companies looking to commercialize new technologies to build their first projects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPut yourself in the shoes of an Energy Vault: They clearly believed that their gravity solution was going to be a big deal, but they needed to build it\u2026 and therefore they needed capital,\u201d Day said. \u201cThat capital was on offer; why wouldn\u2019t they take it?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, as evidenced by the SPAC bust of 2022, \u201cthe valuation is going to crash when people realize that it was too high for the stage of company you were at,\u201d Day said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And being on the public market puts a company in the spotlight, which can be difficult to navigate for a young company. \u201cBy definition,\u201d Day said, \u201cyou\u2019re taking a company that wasn\u2019t ready to IPO, you\u2019re flooding it with cash, and suddenly turning it into a publicly traded company, which is a very different level of scrutiny and expectation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Piconi acknowledged that these high levels of attention were a challenge for Energy Vault, especially given the market volatility of 2025. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInvestors don\u2019t like uncertainty; they don\u2019t like the lumpy revenue and cash flows that we had,\u201d Piconi said. \u201cShould we have gone public then? For the way we saw the world back then, it all made sense\u2026 But [the ups and downs are] something that would have been easier to manage as a private company.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Piconi added that despite the uncertainties, initial investors such as Saudi Aramco and Softbank still own all their shares, and that he himself, the largest shareholder, has continued to buy shares. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pragmatic shift?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Energy Vault\u2019s shift away from gravity storage so soon post-SPAC was met with some skepticism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey immediately pivoted to a vastly over-capitalized battery energy storage systems developer with lithium-ion batteries, because they had to sell something,\u201d Barnard said. \u201cAnd [lithium-ion] was something that actually delivered value in terms of energy storage.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gravity-storage skeptics characterized the move as naive at best, and dishonest at worst. But Day suggests that it might also have been pragmatic: a timely shift that saved the company when so many others have faltered, at least for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEnergy Vault seems to have been able to manage the pivot from the disillusionment about their core solution, which was sold to everybody when they IPOed, into executing on energy storage \u2014 which is now an interesting area, but it is much more prosaic, sort of not-sexy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the climate tech companies that did SPAC deals around the same time as Energy Vault have since gone under. Concentrated solar power company Heliogen<\/a>, which was once valued at $2 billion, was recently acquired by solar company Zeo Energy for $10 million, after being delisted from the stock market in November 2023. And EV start-up Nikola filed for bankruptcy in 2025, after its founder was convicted of misleading investors in 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Electrification company XL Fleet, on the other hand, also managed to survive the SPAC bust, but it did so with a strategy pivot way more radical than Energy Vault\u2019s. In late 2022, XL Fleet acquired residential solar and battery storage company Spruce Power, adopted its name and business model, and shut down its original fleet electrification business. Its stock has been hovering around $5 for the past year. \u201cAt least Energy Vault stuck with large-scale energy storage,\u201d Day said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked about the company\u2019s shift away from gravity storage, Piconi says the advances in lithium-ion batteries in recent years, combined with their fall in price, just made it a better choice for the majority of long-duration storage applications. \u201cWe\u2019re going to leverage the best of the best, whether we develop it or not,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company, he added, has not fully abandoned gravity storage; Piconi said the company has nearly $75 million in gravity storage licenses across China, Africa, and the Middle East. But for the time being, Energy Vault\u2019s research and development efforts are more focused on software development, and on finding ways to take advantage of the tailwinds for energy storage coming from the AI infrastructure buildout. In October, the company announced a collaboration with Crusoe on its SPARK modular data centers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, the shift to owning and operating assets that startled investors last year has picked up speed \u2014 helped considerably by the Orion Infrastructure investment <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company has 340 MW of projects in development or operations, a pipeline of over 3 GW, and two assets in California and Texas in operation with long-term offtake agreements. Earlier this month, it broke ground on a 150 MW storage project in Texas, the first formally acquired under the new Asset Vault platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s unclear if the infrastructure financing will be enough to tide the company over. The Orion investment is structured as preferred equity \u2014 a financial instrument that functions less like a standard investment and more like a high-interest loan. While it avoids diluting shareholders immediately, it often comes with strict repayment terms and high targeted returns for the investor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the energy storage sector has seen an unexpected boost<\/a> over the past year, driven by both the preservation of tax credits in the GOP\u2019s One Big Beautiful Bill and the surging power needs of AI data centers, which seems to validate Energy Vault\u2019s decision to stick to the sector. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRight place, right time,\u201d Day said. \u201c[Storage] happens to be super hot right now.\u201d He noted that infrastructure investors like Orion generally care less about a company\u2019s buzzy origin story than they do about its execution: Securing infrastructure financing, he said, means someone is \u201cidentifying them as a proven project developer, which is, in my mind, part of the story of success for anybody in this space.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Energy Vault announced its $300 million preferred equity investment from Orion Infrastructure Capital last fall, it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-company","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1174,"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions\/1174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/en.esplaza.com.cn\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}