NANO Nuclear Energy officially hit the NASDAQ yesterday and is trading under the ticker $NNE.
- The company listed shares at $4, the low end of the $4–6 range it had announced earlier.
- Nearly 2.6 million shares in total hit the market.
- Some back-of-the-napkin math gives $10.25M in potential proceeds from the offering.
Jay Yu, NANO’s founder, executive chairman, and president, told Ignition that the company is going public early in its lifetime so that it can “grow with the public,” taking advantage of current investor enthusiasm for nuclear energy rather than pursuing more private capital for a larger breakthrough later on. NANO has raised ~$14M in private capital to date.
Take a step back: NANO Nuclear Energy is a microreactor company building two designs in tandem: Zeus, a solid core battery reactor, and Odin, a low-pressure coolant reactor. NANO has additional business lines that aim to earn revenue before the reactors are ready for prime time, including a fuel transportation business and a high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) production plan.
According to Yu, there are three key areas that position NANO to succeed in the public markets:
- Vertical integration. As much as possible, the company is building components in house.
- Additional revenue streams. Those transportation and HALEU businesses will be key to producing revenue in the near term.
- The team, people! “I think the public could see that they could come into a lower valuation company that has…world-class nuclear engineers,” Yu said.
It’s risky to go public so early in the development timeline of a nuclear project (or any new hard tech project, for that matter). The markets don’t tend to be kind to delays, project cancellations, and missed revenue targets. But the company is hoping its commitment to transparency and the growing enthusiasm for advanced nuclear projects will propel it to nuclear success.
Market check: As of market close yesterday, $NNE was trading up ~30%, at a per-share price of $5.19.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
