Austin’s local nuclear energy startup, Aalo Atomics, just got a major funding boost as it looks to beef up its team and make progress toward its holy grail: mass manufacturing of nuclear reactors. The company announced yesterday that it’s raised an additional $27M in funding from investors.
50Y and Valor Equity Partners led the round, which also included participation from Harpoon Ventures, Crosscut, SNR, Alumni Ventures, Preston Werner, Earth Venture, Garage Capital, Wayfinder, Jeff Dean, and Nucleation Capital, the company said.
- The Series A arrives just about a year after the company raised its $6.26M seed round, also led by 50Y and including participation from Valor.
“What’s remarkable is that each of our investors supports us for different reasons,” Aalo CEO Matt Loszak said in a blog post about the raise. “Deep tech, clean baseload for data centers, military applications, reliable energy for developing countries—there are many use cases, and we’re fortunate enough to have investors who want to help us deploy across them all.”
Aalo’s ambitions: Loszak revealed Aalo Atomics to the world back in March 2023 with the goal of making nuclear deployment truly economical. That means scalability and manufacturability of nuclear reactors, as well as designing for a straightforward regulatory process and a deployable product. The ultimate reactor design—a sodium-cooled, uranium zirconium hydride-fueled core—is intended to meet all those requirements.
The company has specific goals for scaling and pricing its technology. Aalo is looking to reach a maximum cost of 3¢ per kilowatt-hour—cheap enough for nuclear to supply more than half of the world’s clean electricity, Loszak wrote last year.
Aalo is looking to link its first units to the grid by 2029, and to get there, it’s building fast. The company has already submitted a plan to the NRC in advance of applying for a license (and that plan includes a whole fleet of reactors).
What’s next? Aalo is currently working with a team of 15, of whom all but the first two have come on in the past nine months. Leadership plans to use its Series A funding to double the team to 30, adding people across engineering, sales, finance, and product, among other areas.
With $27M in funding, there’s some building planned, too. Aalo plans to put its first factory right in its hometown of Austin, TX, and build a non-nuclear reactor prototype called Aalo-0.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
