When Energy Vault announced its $300 million preferred equity investment 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 — and even managing to secure infrastructure financing. 

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. 

The technology was still unproven at scale — and in fact many critics deemed it economically untenable — but the market didn’t care. Energy Vault was already backed by over $200 million in private funding, including a major Series B from SoftBank. The SPAC deal ultimately was valued at over $1 billion. 

By the end of 2022, however, the company was already starting to put gravity storage to the side, 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. 

In early 2025 — right as Trump 2.0 jolted the company further with the introduction of new tariffs — 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. 

Rob Piconi, Energy Vault’s CEO and chairman, told Latitude Media that “investors got a little concerned” at the company’s 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, “investors were waiting to see how we were going to fund these projects in our pipeline,” he said. 

In light of the 2025 announcement, the company’s stock price crept below a dollar. 

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

“Having that $300 million gave investors reason to have confidence,” Piconi said, noting that it gave investors clarity on how Energy Vault was going to finance its portfolio. 

This four-year evolution embodies the consequences of the energy SPAC’s rise and fall. Energy Vault went from a big valuation and potentially revolutionary, if controversial, idea, to a more standard energy storage business.

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 — crossing the so-called “Valley of Death” — 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.

The SPAC ‘pump-and-dump’

At least 69 climate tech companies 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 “frothy.”

“You 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,” Klymochko said. “But at the end of the day, they were highly speculative, and…without the capital market support, many could not survive.” 

Shortly after the Energy Vault deal, though, there was a “dramatic change in investors’ preference,” 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% since the start of 2022, according to Sightline, “underperforming the NASDAQ index by more than 2X.” At that time, Energy Vault’s stock hovered between $3 and $4. 

Even at their most popular, the speculative nature of the SPAC boom raised many eyebrows. 

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: “What 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?”

And Michael Barnard, a climate tech consultant who has criticized Energy Vault’s original gravity storage technology for being “obviously flawed,” told Latitude Media that the company “hit the motherlode with a SPAC reverse takeover,” and that “the clean tech SPAC bubble of the early 2020s functioned like a classic pump-and-dump cycle at the market level.”

(Energy Vault pushed back on Barnard’s criticisms of the gravity technology, maintaining that it has been “extensively tested and validated,” and is economically viable in certain targeted use cases, “particularly where long asset life, site-specific conditions, re-use of waste material and avoidance of supply-chain constraints are priorities.”)

‘Missing middle’ 

However, ​​Klymochko maintains that the “voracious market demand” back then meant that SPAC deals still “seemed to be the right move” for many companies. “If you’re an early stage company, and all of a sudden you can get a $1 billion valuation and raise money off the back of that… it seemed like a very attractive proposition at the time,” he said. 

According to Rob Day, partner and co-founder at climate tech investor Spring Lane Capital, the SPAC’s appeal is the result of the “missing middle”: 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. 

“Put 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… and therefore they needed capital,” Day said. “That capital was on offer; why wouldn’t they take it?” 

However, as evidenced by the SPAC bust of 2022, “the valuation is going to crash when people realize that it was too high for the stage of company you were at,” Day said. 

And being on the public market puts a company in the spotlight, which can be difficult to navigate for a young company. “By definition,” Day said, “you’re taking a company that wasn’t ready to IPO, you’re flooding it with cash, and suddenly turning it into a publicly traded company, which is a very different level of scrutiny and expectation.”

Piconi acknowledged that these high levels of attention were a challenge for Energy Vault, especially given the market volatility of 2025. 

“Investors don’t like uncertainty; they don’t like the lumpy revenue and cash flows that we had,” Piconi said. “Should we have gone public then? For the way we saw the world back then, it all made sense… But [the ups and downs are] something that would have been easier to manage as a private company.” 

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. 

Pragmatic shift?

Energy Vault’s shift away from gravity storage so soon post-SPAC was met with some skepticism. 

“They immediately pivoted to a vastly over-capitalized battery energy storage systems developer with lithium-ion batteries, because they had to sell something,” Barnard said. “And [lithium-ion] was something that actually delivered value in terms of energy storage.” 

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.

“Energy 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 — which is now an interesting area, but it is much more prosaic, sort of not-sexy.” 

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, 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. 

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’s. 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. “At least Energy Vault stuck with large-scale energy storage,” Day said. 

When asked about the company’s 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. “We’re going to leverage the best of the best, whether we develop it or not,” he said. 

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’s 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. 

Meanwhile, the shift to owning and operating assets that startled investors last year has picked up speed — helped considerably by the Orion Infrastructure investment 

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.

It’s unclear if the infrastructure financing will be enough to tide the company over. The Orion investment is structured as preferred equity — 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.

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

“Right place, right time,” Day said. “[Storage] happens to be super hot right now.” He noted that infrastructure investors like Orion generally care less about a company’s buzzy origin story than they do about its execution: Securing infrastructure financing, he said, means someone is “identifying them as a proven project developer, which is, in my mind, part of the story of success for anybody in this space.”

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