Copper just turned up the heat on electrification and managed to keep the lights on while doing it. The Berkeley-based startup closed a $28 million Series A, equity and debt combined, led by Prelude Ventures with Building Ventures, Voyager, Collaborative Fund, Climactic, Designer Fund, Necessary Ventures, Leap Forward Ventures, and Climate Capital also buying in. Congratulations to Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Sam Calisch, who took his background in clean-tech and energy storage and built something deceptively simple: an induction range with its own battery pack.
The product is called Charlie, and it looks like a premium kitchen appliance but works like an energy asset. Plug it into a standard 120-volt outlet, and you can cook off the grid for up to five hours. For landlords and building owners, it eliminates costly electrical panel upgrades. For utilities, it becomes a distributed fleet of controllable assets that can discharge during peak demand and participate in California’s Demand Side Grid Support program. For consumers, it is a six-thousand-dollar range that Wirecutter called “the holy grail of induction.” That kind of validation matters because it is not coming from hype, it is coming from hard testing.
Since late 2024, Copper has shipped nearly a thousand units and secured a contract with the New York City Housing Authority for ten thousand more. Even bigger, NYCHA has flagged interest in three hundred thousand additional units. That is not theoretical demand; that is scale in motion. Combine that with nationwide sales and utility pilot programs, and you see why this Series A is not just about keeping the company alive, it is about acceleration.
Recognition has been quick. Fast Company ranked Copper among its Most Innovative Companies of 2025. Core77 and the Industrial Designers Society of America awarded the design. These aren’t participation ribbons. They are signals that Copper has built a product that solves a structural problem while still appealing to designers, engineers, and consumers. Backing that up is a growing patent portfolio focused on battery integration inside cooking appliances, which locks down the IP as competitors start circling.
The roadmap is equally ambitious. This round fuels manufacturing scale and funds R&D into HVAC and water heating systems set to launch in 2026. Hiring is focused on engineering and grid software talent, building out the ability to integrate appliances into virtual power plants while maintaining the premium user experience. The market opportunity is clear: the U.S. multiunit retrofit segment alone represents over ten billion dollars annually in electrification upgrades. Copper’s model bypasses those upgrades entirely.
The bigger story here is the mindset. Instead of forcing the grid to catch up, Copper put the battery inside the appliance and turned a barrier into a feature. That shift reframes how electrification can spread across buildings that were never designed for it. Investors like Prelude Ventures see the potential, but contracts, shipments, and utility partnerships already prove it out.
Copper is not just selling stoves. They are selling time, time saved on retrofits, time saved during outages, time the grid buys back during peaks. And in a market this large, that kind of timing is everything.
