Energy · Deep dive

Moment Energy

A Coquitlam-based, four-founder SFU spinout building the world's largest second-life battery factory — repurposing retired EV packs from Mercedes and Nissan into containerized BESS while new-cell LFP prices race downward beneath it.

emerging

The question that decides it: Does second-life BESS clear the cost-of-capital hurdle as new-cell LFP prices keep falling and automotive OEMs bring second-life in-house — or does Moment's factory scale itself into a stranded position between free-falling cell prices and OEM feedstock lock-up within 24 months?

My take ★★ Very interesting ★ Interesting − Maybe ✗ Not interesting

Snapshot

Moment Energy takes retired electric-vehicle battery packs — mostly from Mercedes-Benz and Nissan under signed supply agreements — strips out the automaker’s battery management system, rewrites its own, and re-integrates the cells into containerized battery energy storage systems it sells to microgrids, remote industry, defence customers and, increasingly, grid-scale developers. The company was founded in 2020 by four Simon Fraser University mechatronics grads, closed a US$40M+ Series B on May 5, 2026 (Evok Innovations leading, with Liberty Mutual, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, Tokyo Gas’s Acario, W23 and In-Q-Tel behind it), and on June 23, 2026 opened what it calls the world’s largest EV battery repurposing megafactory — a ~100,000 sq ft plant in the Vancouver area targeting 1 GWh/year by 2030. Total capital in is now above US$100M including a US$20.3M DOE grant for a second, 200,000 sq ft “gigafactory” outside Austin. Every headline milestone is real. So is the fact that new-cell LFP is now at $40–55/kWh at the factory gate in China, which is the specific number this entire investment thesis has to keep beating.

Founding story

The four founders met as Mechatronic Systems Engineering undergraduates at SFU and did the company as their capstone project inside the Charles Chang Institute for Entrepreneurship’s Technology Entrepreneurship @ SFU programme in 2019–2020. Chiang — the son of an air-force-adjacent household who himself became a Royal Canadian Air Force officer and Air Cadet flight instructor — brought the government-facing instincts and the willingness to knock on the doors of the Department of National Defence and, later, In-Q-Tel. Soares owned battery diagnostics from the start; Rattan took operations; Sidhu took product. They incorporated in 2020, won the 2021 National Impact Investor Challenge, and closed a C$3.5M seed round in November 2021 led by Vancouver’s Version One Ventures, with Garage Capital, Fika and MCJ backing.

Two things about the origin story matter for the investment case. First, the founder team is genuinely technical — four engineers from the same programme, with the CTO owning the BMS and the COO owning the physical factory. This is not a business team that hired engineers. Second, Chiang’s RCAF background is not a biographical footnote — it is why Moment landed the Canadian DND deployment with TUGLIQ, why In-Q-Tel came into the Series A in January 2025, and why the pitch to the U.S. Department of Energy for the Texas gigafactory read as a domestic-supply-chain-security story rather than a pure clean-energy pitch.

How it works

The mechanical process is more industrial than the marketing suggests. A retired EV pack arrives at the Vancouver megafactory under one of Moment’s supply agreements — Mercedes-Benz Energy under a signed pack-supply deal, Nissan North America under a supply-chain relationship for Leaf packs — with roughly 70–80% of original capacity remaining. Moment disassembles the pack to the module level, runs a diagnostic sweep (a step it is deepening through a partnership with Toronto-based electrochemistry firm Pulsenics, announced in 2025), sorts modules by state of health, and reassembles them inside a Moment-designed enclosure. Critically, the automaker’s original BMS is discarded and replaced with software Moment wrote itself, because a Leaf’s onboard controller has no interest in being asked to bid into an ancillary-services market.

The two productised outputs are Flora and Luna. Flora is a 60 kWh containerized system built for off-grid work — the SKU that sits behind God’s Pocket resort’s diesel gensets on the BC coast, at Quadra Island, and inside the Canadian DND’s Pop Up City demonstration. Luna is the newer, grid-scale platform: a 400 kWh Half Luna and a 1 MWh Full Luna, stackable to 10 MWh per site. On October 14, 2025 Moment said Luna became the first repurposed-battery BESS to complete UL 1973, UL 9540 and UL 9540A safety testing — the certification set that gate-keeps most US utility interconnections and, importantly, most insurance underwriting. Moment had earlier become the first company in North America to receive UL 1974, which is the standard specifically for repurposed batteries.

Once installed, a Luna behaves like any other lithium-iron-phosphate or NMC BESS to the offtaker: charge, discharge, ancillary services, backup. The physical difference the operator lives with is a shorter guaranteed cycle life and a warranty that the industry is still learning how to price.

Product and business overview

Three things Moment sells. Hardware — Flora and Luna, delivered turnkey with commissioning. A repurposing service to automakers — pack take-back for Mercedes and Nissan, which for the OEM is partly a cost-of-goods-recovered play and partly a regulatory hedge against extended-producer-responsibility regimes tightening in the EU and Canada. Deployment origination — Moment is not just an integrator; on projects like God’s Pocket and TUGLIQ, it plays a project-developer role, wiring the BESS into hybrid microgrids alongside solar and wind.

The strategic bet layered on top is domestic manufacturing capacity. Vancouver Megafactory 1 opened June 23, 2026 — the company says it went from decision to operational in six weeks — with the stated ambition of processing 25,000 disused EV batteries a year and reaching 1 GWh of annual BESS output by 2030. The Taylor, Texas gigafactory, funded in part by the October 2024 US$20.3M DOE grant, is a 200,000 sq ft build targeting up to 2 GWh/year and commissioning around 2028. Together they are supposed to constitute a North American, non-Chinese second-life supply chain — a positioning that plays to both the Inflation-Reduction-Act-successor incentives in the US and, more directly, to In-Q-Tel’s thesis that battery storage should not be structurally dependent on Chinese cell imports.

Business model and pricing

Moment does not publish price lists, and the underlying economics of second-life are still a moving target — this is the section where honest analysis matters most.

Second-life BESS is meaningfully cheaper on upfront capex than new-cell alternatives. A 2024 US DOT / rosap.ntl.bts.gov study cited installed costs at roughly 64–79% of new-cell equivalents on a $/kWh capex basis. Sector rules of thumb put the discount closer to 30–50%. The problem is levelized cost of storage (LCOS). The same DOT work modelled second-life LCOS at roughly $234–278/MWh over a 15-year project, against $211/MWh for a comparable new-cell system — because second-life packs cycle less, degrade faster and require more replacement events. That study was written when new-cell LFP was materially more expensive than it is today; in 2026 wholesale LFP cells in China are trading at $40–55/kWh, and turnkey utility BESS in ex-US markets clears at $110–145/kWh. Every dollar those numbers fall makes the second-life LCOS gap wider, not narrower.

Which means the business only works in a specific set of use cases. Off-grid and remote microgrids, where the marginal alternative is diesel at effective prices well above $500/MWh. Behind-the-meter commercial and industrial customers where footprint and utilisation are low enough that cycle life is not the binding constraint. Defence and critical-infrastructure applications where domestic-supply and demand-response certainty matter more than $/MWh. And large corporate ESG buyers — Amazon among them, which is both an investor and a plausible customer — willing to pay some premium for the circularity story. Moment has landed real deployments in three of those four buckets. The utility-scale, insured, PPA-financed segment — where the money is — is still ahead of it.

Traction over time

Two things the time series does not show. Deployed-MWh in the field is still small — publicly, discrete projects like God’s Pocket, Quadra Island and the TUGLIQ demonstration, plus commercial customers Moment has declined to name. Revenue has not been disclosed and no third-party estimate (PitchBook, CB Insights, Latka) had it as of the May 2026 raise; this is a company whose valuation math still runs on capacity and certifications, not booked ARR.

Market analysis

The tailwind is genuinely large. MarketsandMarkets pegged the second-life EV battery market at roughly 25–30 GWh in 2025 growing to 330–350 GWh by 2030 at a ~65% CAGR. McKinsey’s Center for Future Mobility put annual second-life supply above 200 GWh/year by 2030. The upstream driver is retirement: 4–6 million EVs are estimated to reach end-of-first-life by 2027–2028, producing 250–300 GWh of pack capacity that has to go somewhere. Meanwhile, on the demand side, the global BESS market has been installing roughly 200 GWh/year, with grid-scale queues in the US averaging around five years and hyperscaler data-centre load driving flexibility demand.

The counter-signal is what is happening to the price of the alternative. New-cell LFP is not a static substitute — it is a falling one. From roughly $100/kWh cell in 2023 to $40–55/kWh in 2026 depending on chemistry and geography. Every second-life project pencilling out today has to survive another leg down. The other counter-signal is feedstock: the same OEMs Moment relies on for supply are increasingly reluctant to hand the residual value away. GM’s June 2026 full-lifecycle deal with Redwood earmarked ~10,000 packs for second-life inside Redwood’s own energy business. Nissan and Sumitomo’s 4R Energy has been repurposing Leaf packs domestically for a decade. Renault’s Advanced Battery Storage programme has been running since 2019. If Mercedes and Nissan decide the repurposing margin belongs to them, the two supply agreements underwriting Moment’s factory look very different.

Competitive intel

Moment does not really face a single competitor set — it faces three overlapping ones, each attacking from a different angle.

New-cell BESS integrators — Tesla Megapack, Fluence, Powin, Wärtsilä. These are the incumbents in every deal where the customer has choice. Megapack in particular is the reference case: LFP chemistry, ~$180–240/kWh installed in the US, insured at standard rates, bankable on 20-year IPP horizons. Moment beats them on upfront capex and on the circularity story; it does not beat them on cycle-life warranty or on insurer familiarity. In head-to-head competition for a bankable utility PPA, Moment loses today.

Other second-life pure-plays — B2U Storage Solutions, RePurpose Energy, Smartville, Zenobē, Connected Energy, BeePlanet. The field is fragmented and mostly earlier-stage. B2U is the closest peer on deployed track record with 50+ MWh in the field via its patented EV Pack Storage architecture that avoids full teardown. Moment’s edge in this cohort is the certification stack (UL 1974 + UL 9540/9540A on Luna) and manufacturing capacity — none of these competitors has publicly claimed a factory at Moment’s scale. But this cohort is where a Chinese entrant with feedstock access could enter cheapest.

Automotive OEM in-house — Nissan/Sumitomo 4R Energy, Renault Advanced Battery Storage, GM Second Life via Redwood. This is the structural risk. The two automakers who currently feed Moment (Mercedes and Nissan) both have institutional knowledge of second-life; both could plausibly move it in-house or hand it to Redwood-style partners. And Redwood — same investor as Moment in Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund — is now running the largest second-life microgrid in the world for Crusoe (12 MW / 63 MWh in Sparks, Nevada). Redwood collects EV packs as scrap already; the marginal cost of repurposing rather than recycling is small.

History and evolution

• 2019–2020 — Four SFU Mechatronics undergrads build the company as a capstone project.
• 2020 — Incorporation. Team of four operating out of “half a garage” per Chiang’s later telling.
• 2021 — Wins National Impact Investor Challenge; places third at New Ventures BC.
• Nov 2021 — C$3.5M seed round led by Version One Ventures.
• 2023 — Mercedes-Benz Energy signs pack-supply agreement for Flora BESS.
• 2024 — Nissan North America supply agreement; TUGLIQ / DND deployment (Aug); UL 1974 certification (North America first); DOE US$20.3M grant for Texas gigafactory (Oct).
• Jan 2025 — US$15M Series A co-led by Amazon Climate Pledge Fund and Voyager Ventures; In-Q-Tel joins.
• 2025 — Vancouver manufacturing hub reaches full-scale production; Pulsenics diagnostics partnership.
• Oct 2025 — Luna BESS completes UL 1973, UL 9540 and UL 9540A testing (first repurposed BESS to do so). Chiang named Fasken Cleantech Leader of the Year.
• May 5 2026 — US$40M+ Series B closes, led by Evok Innovations; total capital passes US$100M.
• Jun 23 2026 — Vancouver Megafactory 1 opens, six weeks after announcement.
• ~2028 (target) — Texas gigafactory (Taylor, TX) commissioning.

The failures and stumbles are quieter than at a comparable US startup, largely because Moment’s pace has been the opposite of Base Power’s — patient hardware, patient certification, patient supply agreements. The two visible drags are the four-year gap between seed and Series A, which was a genuinely tough cleantech-hardware funding climate BetaKit called out at the time, and the fact that no third-party revenue figure exists for the company through mid-2026.

What people say

The case for. The certification stack is real and unusual. UL 1974 plus UL 9540/9540A on Luna makes Moment the only repurposed-battery integrator in North America able to check every safety-standards box a utility procurement officer or an insurance underwriter will ask about. The DND deployment is a real installed reference, not a pilot — TUGLIQ reported ≥33% fuel savings in the field. The investor list is a “who signs cheques for the second-life thesis” list in miniature: Amazon Climate Pledge because it wants low-carbon storage in its own footprint, In-Q-Tel because Chinese cells make national-security officials nervous, Liberty Mutual because underwriters need to learn to price these assets, Acario/Tokyo Gas because Japanese utilities have watched 4R Energy for a decade. The founders are stickier than most — same team, same programme, six years in, no visible C-suite turnover. Chiang’s public-sector fluency is a genuine moat: a competitor without it does not get an In-Q-Tel cheque, a DOE grant and a DND deployment in the same 24 months.

The complaints. The uncomfortable ones are structural, not operational. First, the LCOS math. The best public academic modelling — the DOT rosap.ntl.bts.gov study — found second-life LCOS at $234–278/MWh against $211/MWh for new-cell, and that was written before LFP cell prices fell to $40–55/kWh. Every second-life pitch has to explain why the customer should pay a levelized premium for the story. Second, insurance and warranty. Trade press has been openly sceptical of second-life bankability for years; even the emerging second-life warranty-insurance market (5–10 year coverage, per Growth Market Reports) still charges enough that project financiers rate insured second-life systems 150–200 bps more expensive to debt-finance than uninsured new-cell. Third, feedstock exposure. Moment’s two announced supply relationships (Mercedes, Nissan) are the same two OEMs most likely to bring second-life in-house; Chinese OEMs, who dominate global EV production, are not selling their retired packs to Canadian repurposers. Fourth, the “world’s largest” claim invites scrutiny: Redwood’s Sparks, NV 12 MW / 63 MWh Crusoe installation is already larger as a deployed second-life project than anything Moment has fielded — the megafactory is a capacity claim, not a fleet claim. Glassdoor sentiment is thin (small sample) but consistent with a small, fast-scaling hardware startup — long hours, mission alignment, uneven manager quality. There is no visible G2/Capterra criticism because Moment is a hardware-project business, not a software vendor.

Outlook: the open question

The question resolves on three conditions: (a) landing a bankable multi-year offtake with a utility or hyperscaler at insurance terms comparable to new-cell BESS; (b) publishing 6,000+ real-fleet cycles on deployed Luna systems with independent verification; and (c) keeping feedstock — the Mercedes and Nissan supply agreements — from being pulled in-house before Megafactory 1 and the Taylor gigafactory hit their design throughput. All three are actively in play in the next 24 months.

The bull case is that the second-life bet does not need to beat Megapack in every deal, only in the specific segments where circularity, domestic supply chain, or off-grid economics dominate — and that the certification advantage Moment built with UL 1974 and UL 9540/9540A locks in the utility and defence segments before Redwood, B2U or an OEM in-house programme catches up. Chiang’s public-sector rolodex is a real accelerant here; the DND, DOE and In-Q-Tel wins tell you the company can win in places pure venture-backed competitors cannot.

The bear case is more specific than “new-cell is getting cheaper”. It is that Moment is building two factories priced against a $/kWh curve that keeps falling; that the OEMs supplying its feedstock are watching Redwood/GM and drawing conclusions; that its insured LCOS is structurally worse than new-cell for the utility-scale segment that dominates the demand growth curve to 2030; and that Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund backs both Moment and Redwood, which tells you the strategic hedge is running both directions. At ~$100M raised the model still has runway to prove itself out. Another turn of the capital stack at a Base-Power-style valuation would require answering all three of the conditions above, publicly.

How a challenger would attack it

Attack the feedstock, not the factory. Moment’s whole position hangs on two OEM supply agreements — Mercedes and Nissan — and both automakers have institutional second-life knowledge (4R Energy has repurposed Leaf packs for a decade). A challenger’s fastest move is Redwood’s: control pack collection at the scrap layer, where packs arrive anyway, and make repurposing a marginal-cost decision rather than a negotiated supply deal. Whoever owns collection owns Moment’s raw material. The second vector is the economics Moment cannot argue away: second-life LCOS of $234-278/MWh versus $211/MWh new-cell — modelled before LFP fell to $40-55/kWh — means a new-cell integrator can simply wait, let the curve fall, and take the utility-scale segment Moment hasn’t entered. Third, and cheapest: a challenger with a balance-sheet partner could attack the insurance gap head-on, wrapping second-life systems with a cycle-life warranty guaranteed by an underwriter, since project financiers currently price insured second-life debt 150-200 bps wide of new-cell. Moment raised from Liberty Mutual precisely because this is the unsolved piece — a competitor who solves it first, with B2U’s 50+ MWh operating history as actuarial evidence, takes the bankable-PPA segment before Moment’s Texas plant even commissions.

Same playbook, new buyer

Same repurposing stack, feedstock the OEMs won’t fight over. Moment’s contested input is passenger-EV packs from automakers who increasingly want the residual value themselves. The uncontested version is commercial fleets: transit buses, delivery vans and yard trucks retire batteries in large, homogeneous, single-owner batches, and fleet operators have no in-house second-life ambitions — they want disposal off their books. A player running Moment’s diagnostics-and-BMS-rewrite playbook against fleet packs gets cleaner feedstock economics without competing with its own suppliers. Geographically, the model ports best to markets where Moment’s core segments are the whole market: island grids and remote mining across the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Africa, where the alternative is diesel above $500/MWh and second-life LCOS clears easily — no UL-driven utility procurement, no insurance-rate spread to fight. Moment won’t follow soon; its capital is committed to two North American factories and a domestic-supply-chain story built for DOE, DND and In-Q-Tel. The defence angle itself is also franchisable: an EU or AUKUS-market equivalent of Chiang’s playbook — certification-first, ministry-of-defence references — faces no Moment presence at all.

Sources and further reading

• PR Newswire / Moment Energy — Series B US$40M+ raise announcement (May 5, 2026)
• TechCrunch — “Moment Energy raises $40M to meet ‘infinite demand for power’ with EV batteries” (May 5, 2026)
• Energy-Storage.News — Moment Energy secures US$40M to scale second-life BESS in North America (May 2026)
• Electrek — “‘World’s largest’ second-life EV battery factory opens in just six weeks” (July 2, 2026)
• Canada’s National Observer — “Moment Energy opens world’s largest ‘second life’ battery plant in hometown” (June 24, 2026)
• Canada’s National Observer — Profile of Edward Chiang, RCAF officer and Moment Energy CEO (January 29, 2026)
• Moment Energy — “Luna BESS Becomes First Repurposed Battery System to Achieve All Key Safety Milestones” (October 14, 2025)
• PR Newswire — “Moment Energy Secures US$15M Series A” (January 16, 2025)
• BetaKit — “Moment Energy secures $28.1M CAD from US Department of Energy to establish gigafactory in Texas” (October 2024)
• BC Technology / T-Net — “Moment Energy and TUGLIQ Energy Deploy BESS for Canadian Department of National Defense” (August 2, 2024)
• Electrek — “GM becomes first automaker to partner with Redwood across the full battery lifecycle” (June 9, 2026)
• MarketsandMarkets — “Second Life EV Battery Market worth 330-350 GWh by 2030” (2025)
• U.S. DOT ROSA-P — Applying Levelized Cost of Storage Methodology to Utility-Scale Second-Life Lithium-Ion BESS