Nora: A billion dollars. For batteries. In your backyard. Right next to the grill, apparently.
Dex: [laughs] And that's the SECOND billion, Nora. This is Dex.
Nora: This is Nora. It's Monday, August third, 2026. Three stories today.
Dex: [excited] Big money, scary AI, and Congress. Let's go.
Dex: Base Power just raised another billion dollars to save the grid — with backyard batteries.
Nora: Horizon3 is now worth two billion after a two-fifty Series E, because apparently AI threats are escalating.
Dex: And Congress has a favorite AI tool. Spoiler: it's ChatGPT.
Nora: [dry] Your tax dollars, summarizing legislation. Sleep well.
Dex: So Base Power, out of Austin, just closed another billion to ramp up production on home batteries.
Nora: Another. That word's doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Dex: Right? They raised big last year, and now they're back with a full B to scale manufacturing.
Nora: So the pitch is: the grid's broken, utilities are slow, so let's bolt a lithium cabinet to two hundred thousand houses.
Dex: [excited] That's exactly the pitch, and I kind of love it. You aggregate all those batteries into one virtual power plant.
Nora: Hold on — 'virtual power plant' is the phrase that's been raising money since 2015 and delivering slides.
Dex: Base is different, though. They're not selling you hardware. They're selling electricity, and the battery just comes with the plan.
Nora: Okay, that part I respect. Bundling it into the utility bill means they eat the install cost instead of you financing a twenty-thousand-dollar box.
Dex: And when Texas grid prices spike, they discharge into the grid and print money. That's the margin.
Nora: Which is also the risk. That's a hardware company with a commodity trading desk taped to it.
Dex: [laughs] Hot take: that's the most interesting business model in energy right now.
Nora: My hot take — a billion dollars in cells, factories, and truck rolls might be the most capital-intensive way anyone's ever tried to disrupt a monopoly.
Dex: What this means for you: if you're in Texas, you might end up on a power plan where blackouts just... stop happening at your house.
Nora: Read the contract, though. You're signing a multi-year electricity agreement with a startup. Ask what happens to the box if they get acquired.
Dex: Fair. But if this works, the grid gets rebuilt from the driveway in.
Nora: [dry] If.
Nora: Next up — Horizon3 just raised two hundred fifty million at a two billion dollar valuation.
Dex: Series E, cybersecurity, and the thesis is simple: annual penetration testing is dead.
Nora: Dead how? Compliance auditors still want that PDF once a year.
Dex: Sure, but attackers aren't on an annual cadence anymore. With AI tooling, someone's probing you continuously.
Nora: So the product is basically an autonomous attacker living inside your network, forever trying doors.
Dex: Continuous security validation. It exploits you before someone else does and hands you the receipt.
Nora: [sarcastic] Great. My alert fatigue now has a subscription.
Dex: [laughs] No, that's the thing — it's not alerts, it's proof. It shows you the exact path it took to your domain admin.
Nora: Okay, that IS the useful version. Half of security spend is buying tools nobody can prove actually work.
Dex: Which is why two billion doesn't feel crazy to me. Boards want a number they can point at.
Nora: It feels crazy to me until I see net retention. Security's a graveyard of tools that got panic budget one year and got cut the next.
Dex: Panic years pay well, though.
Nora: [sighs] They do. And here's the ugly truth — AI made offense cheaper way faster than it made defense smarter.
Dex: What this means for you: if you're an early-stage founder selling to enterprise, expect buyers to ask for continuous validation evidence now, not just a once-a-year pen test letter.
Nora: And if you're a pen tester — your job's not gone, but the commodity part just got automated. Move up the stack.
Dex: Last one — House spending records show what AI tool Capitol Hill actually pays for. ChatGPT, and it's not close.
Nora: Dominating paid AI use in congressional offices. Drafting memos, summarizing legislation, constituent mail.
Dex: Which is wild, because these are the same offices holding hearings about AI risk.
Nora: [dry] Nothing says regulatory clarity like asking a chatbot to summarize the bill you're regulating it with.
Dex: [laughs] To be fair, a staffer processing ten thousand constituent letters a month is exactly the use case this was built for.
Nora: Until it hallucinates a bill number in a letter that goes out on official letterhead.
Dex: But the real story here is distribution. OpenAI didn't win some procurement fight — they won because staffers already used it at home.
Nora: Bottoms-up into government. That's the moat. Habit, not features.
Dex: And every enterprise-AI competitor pitching Washington just found out they're playing for second.
Nora: My skeptical note: spending records show seats, not value. Nobody's published what the actual output quality looks like.
Dex: Hot take — within two years there's an official congressional AI, and it's just this with a compliance wrapper.
Nora: [beat] You're probably right, and I hate it.
Dex: What this means for you: if you sell software to the public sector, landing individual users and expanding beats a two-year RFP every time.
Nora: And if you email your representative — congratulations, you might be talking to a language model. Be nice to it, I guess.
Dex: Quick rundown — Base Power banked another billion to put batteries in backyards and sell you the electrons.
Nora: Horizon3 hit two billion on that two-fifty Series E, betting the annual pen test is a relic.
Dex: And ChatGPT is quietly the most-used paid AI tool in the House of Representatives.
Nora: [dry] Three stories, one theme: everybody's automating the thing they used to only do once a year.
Dex: Before we go — I did the math on the Base thing. A billion dollars in battery cells is basically a whole lot of very heavy, very flammable backyard furniture.
Nora: [laughs] My HOA rejected a fence. I'd love to watch them process a power plant next to the tomatoes.
Dex: That's the real bottleneck. Not lithium supply — neighborhood associations.
Nora: That's the show. Batteries by the grill, robots in your network, and a chatbot writing your congressman's mail.
Dex: [excited] Back tomorrow with more. Nora, don't sign any multi-year electricity contracts before then.
This show is made with AI: the hosts’ voices are synthetic and the scripts are AI-assisted. Every story links to its original source.