Heron Power’s newest funding announcement cites more than 40 gigawatts of customer interest in its Heron Link power conversion system. The company’s own materials from earlier this year put that figure higher, at a backlog exceeding 50 gigawatts, and founder Drew Baglino told Latitude Media in August that demand was running well north of the 40 gigawatts of capacity planned for the company’s first factory. Across every version of that claim, only two customers behind it have been publicly named: Intersect Power, acquired by Google in 2025, and data center developer Crusoe.
Heron Link is a solid-state transformer, a category of grid hardware that replaces the passive magnetic core at the heart of a conventional transformer with wide-bandgap semiconductors switching at high frequency to convert medium-voltage grid power down to 800 volts. Each unit is rated at roughly 5 megawatts and assembled from smaller identical modules designed to be swapped in the field in about 10 minutes, an approach the company frames explicitly as applying a battery-manufacturing playbook, proven physics wrapped in software and scaled aggressively in production, to a grid hardware category that engineers have proposed for decades without it reaching large-scale utility deployment. Founder Drew Baglino was Tesla’s senior vice president of powertrain and energy engineering before leaving the company in 2024, and Tesla co-founder JB Straubel and former Tesla chief financial officer Zach Kirkhorn were both early backers, with Kirkhorn now joining Heron’s board following this month’s financing.
The company’s capital raised has scaled quickly against a still-early technical validation timeline. Heron closed a 38 million dollar Series A in May 2025 led by Capricorn Investment Group, followed by a 140 million dollar Series B in February 2026 co-led by Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism Fund and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and this month added a 60 million dollar credit facility from JP Morgan and TriplePoint, bringing total funding since 2025 to roughly 178 million dollars in equity alone before the new debt facility. That capital is funding a Morgan Hill, California conversion project targeting mass production by late 2027, but the company’s own disclosed development schedule places initial field demonstrations of Heron Link in mid-2026 and partner installations in early 2027, meaning the manufacturing scale-up is proceeding on a timeline that allows for little more than a year of real-world field data before mass production begins.
The specific policy environment Baglino has pointed to as favorable for Heron’s US-manufactured alternative is concrete and verifiable. He has cited the Federal Communications Commission’s restrictions on new foreign inverter models and tariffs as high as 55% on imported power conversion components as conditions working in the company’s favor, a backdrop consistent with the broader tightening of rules around Chinese-linked grid equipment that has accelerated through 2026, including the Trump administration’s August executive order restricting foreign-produced bulk power system equipment from connecting to the US grid. That policy shift creates genuine demand-side tailwinds for a domestically manufactured transformer alternative regardless of how the underlying solid-state technology performs, since developers facing restricted access to imported components have a structural reason to consider new US suppliers even before that supplier has an extensive operating track record.
Baglino’s stated expectation that customers will not pay a premium over traditional transformer technology is a claim worth measuring against unusual conditions in that traditional market rather than against normal pricing. Conventional power transformers have carried lead times stretching to as long as three years amid a well-documented US supply shortage, a scarcity that has already pushed prices for standard units higher across the industry, meaning Heron’s cost benchmark is being set against an unusually expensive and supply-constrained incumbent technology rather than against transformer pricing in a well-functioning market. Whether Heron Link can match that elevated price point once it reaches commercial-scale manufacturing, rather than the cost profile of a company scaling from two named early customers, has not yet been demonstrated at the volumes the Morgan Hill facility is designed to reach. Solid-state transformers remain a technology without the multi-decade operational track record that has made conventional transformer designs, whatever their current supply problems, the trusted default for grid operators, and Heron’s compressed validation window between this year’s field demonstrations and next year’s targeted mass production means the 40 gigawatt capacity figure attached to this announcement describes investor and early-customer confidence in the company’s execution plan more than it describes a technology that has completed the extended field validation grid hardware of this kind has historically required before wide adoption.
