# Torus **Type:** venture **Status:** Draft **Confidence:** Medium **Focus:** energy storage, flywheels, grid infrastructure, data centers, domestic manufacturing **Stage:** Growth ($200M from Magnetar, Sept 2025; ~$267M+ raised to date) **Location:** Salt Lake City, UT **Updated:** 2026-06-18 **Domain:** energy, materials-mfg **Region:** Salt Lake City **Needs-reviewed:** 2026-06-18 **Hero:** https://picsum.photos/seed/torus-flywheel-slc/1600/1100 **Hero caption:** *Placeholder image. A license-clean photograph of a Torus flywheel unit or the GigaOne campus is still needed — see Open Questions.* **Pull:** *Spinning steel plus batteries, built in Utah, aimed at the grid's hardest short-duration problems.* **Relates:** cites [Official Website: Torus](torus-official-website.md) ## Summary Torus builds modular energy infrastructure that pairs mechanical flywheels with batteries to deliver fast, reliable power at the edge of the grid and on industrial sites. The company is headquartered in Salt Lake City and is building a large domestic manufacturing campus there. Its pitch is firm, high-cycle, low-chemical-hazard storage that can respond to grid signals in milliseconds, made with U.S. materials rather than imported lithium chemistry alone. For Utah operators, Torus is one of the clearest examples of hard-tech manufacturing scaling inside the state — not a software company, but a company pouring concrete, building rotating machinery, and hiring power-electronics and grid engineers. ## Impact The forcing function behind Torus is the surge in electricity demand from data centers and AI workloads, layered on a grid that needs more frequency regulation, voltage support, and short-duration backup. Flywheels store energy kinetically in a spinning mass: they tolerate effectively unlimited deep cycles (mechanical wear is the limit), avoid chemical degradation and thermal runaway, and can be built from domestic materials. Torus's bet is that combining a flywheel ("Nova Spin") with a lithium-iron-phosphate battery ("Nova Pulse") captures both fast response and useful duration in one modular "Torus Station." [source:torus-magnetar-raise] The impact case is real but unproven at the scale the company is targeting. Grid-scale flywheel storage has a long history of companies that struggled on economics versus lithium. Torus's claim to differentiation is the hybrid architecture, the software/cybersecurity layer, and domestic manufacturing — not the flywheel alone. ## What They Are Building Torus describes a "full-stack energy platform": storage (flywheel + battery), management software, cybersecurity, and generation services, deployed as distributed modular units that can be linked into a "grid operating system." The company says its units provide frequency and voltage support for utility partners and peak shaving, emergency backup, and power-quality services for commercial and industrial customers. [source:torus-magnetar-raise] The manufacturing story is central. Torus grew from a prototype in Springville, Utah into a 40,000-square-foot facility, and is now building GigaOne, a 540,000-square-foot campus in Salt Lake City, with a stated goal of scaling to more than one gigawatt of capacity per quarter within three years. It received a TIME Best Invention of 2024 award and a 2025 R&D 100 Award. Those production targets are aspirations, not delivered capacity. ## What They Need Now Likely needs include mechanical engineers with rotating-machinery or energy-storage backgrounds, power-electronics engineers, grid-systems and interconnection engineers, controls and embedded-software engineers, manufacturing and operations leaders to stand up GigaOne, and field-deployment and O&M technicians. The April 2026 equipment-financing facility from Trinity Capital points to a hardware-heavy capital structure where manufacturing throughput is the bottleneck. [source:torus-trinity-equipment-financing] The candidate fit is unusually strong for engineers coming from heavy industry, utilities, defense manufacturing, or aerospace who want frontier energy work without leaving Utah. ## Who Could Help Useful helpers include utility interconnection specialists, project-finance and equipment-finance advisors, data-center power-procurement contacts, manufacturing-scale-up operators, and grid-market experts who can pressure-test the revenue model for short-duration storage. Torus also belongs in conversations about how Utah retains advanced-manufacturing jobs and supply chains. ## Utah Context Torus is a genuinely Utah-rooted hard-tech company: founded in the state, prototyped in Springville, headquartered in Salt Lake City, and building its flagship factory there. That makes it relevant to Utah's broader energy and manufacturing story alongside geothermal players like [Fervo Energy](fervo-energy.md) and [Zanskar Geothermal](zanskar-geothermal.md) — different technologies, same theme of firm, domestic, Utah-built power. It is a strong entry for the energy track of the [Utah Deep-Tech Map](utah-deep-tech-map.md) and for readers using [Find Meaningful Work in Utah](find-meaningful-work.md) who want hardware over software. ## Evidence - [Official Website: Torus](torus-official-website.md) - [Source: Torus $200M Magnetar Investment](torus-magnetar-raise.md) - [Source: Trinity Capital Equipment Financing for Torus](torus-trinity-equipment-financing.md) ## Open Questions - **Founding date / founders.** Torus's own materials say founded 2021; an internal note suggested ~2018 with founders Nate Walkingshaw and Gilbert Lee. Verify the date and current leadership before stating either definitively. - **Capital structure.** A $200M raise from Magnetar (an alternative-asset manager with energy-credit experience) plus equipment financing may indicate project-finance-style deployment rather than pure venture scaling. Understand the mix of equity vs. debt before drawing conclusions about runway. - **Unit economics.** Whether the hybrid flywheel-battery system is cost-competitive against lithium-only short-duration storage at deployed scale is the core unproven question. - **Scope shift.** Torus repositioned from earlier home/edge energy management toward "modular power plants" for utilities and data centers; verify how cleanly the underlying technology carried across. - **Imagery.** Hero is a deterministic picsum placeholder. A license-clean photo of a Torus unit or GigaOne (company press kit, with rights cleared) should replace it.