Aalo Atomics, a Texas-based nuclear power startup led by Matt Loszak, co-founder of Canadian human resources app Humi, has closed a $100-million USD (over $138.6-million CAD) Series B funding round.
The round was led by SpaceX investor Valor Equity Partners and involved Canada’s Maple VC, which typically invests at the pre-seed and seed stages. Other investors represented a mix of new and established backers, including Hitachi Ventures, Fifty Years, Crosscut, Harpoon Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.
“The world needs as much nuclear energy as we can get, as soon as we can get it.”
Matt Loszak, Aalo Atomics
Aalo said in a blog post that the funding gave it the capital necessary for building Aalo-X, its first nuclear power plant. The facility will include an experimental data centre to demonstrate how nuclear power can potentially serve data providers. Loszak claimed on X that this will represent the “first time” a nuclear plant and data centre will be built together.
The new funding comes a year after Aalo raised a $27-million USD (about $37-million CAD) Series A and over two years after a nearly $6.3-million USD ($8.5-million CAD) seed round from April 2023.
Aalo aims to challenge conventional nuclear power by deploying factory-made, fleet-scale reactors instead of custom plants. It hopes its Aalo Pods, which include five reactors and one turbine, will lower the technology costs and help make it possible to install plants in more locations. The startup claims in its post that this could make nuclear power more accessible to developing countries, municipal utilities, and even “places beyond Earth.”
“The world needs as much nuclear energy as we can get, as soon as we can get it,” Loszak said in announcing the news.
The company has previously touted greater safety through the combination of a more efficient metallic coolant and the use of uranium zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel. UZrH has a unique property: its ability to sustain a nuclear chain reaction decreases as its temperature increases. Reactors containing the fuel automatically shut down if they start to overheat .
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Aalo pitches itself as the “future” of artificial intelligence (AI), addressing a concern that nuclear power might be necessary to cope with the energy demands from the rapidly growing data centre industry. Technology giants have turned to nuclear as a solution for their growing demands in recent months. Google this week unveiled its first “advanced” nuclear reactor partnership, the Tennessee-based Hermes 2 Plant due to come online in 2030, while Microsoft said last year that it would reopen Pennsylvania’s ill-fated Three Mile Island plant in 2028.
Loszak told BetaKit last year that he was Humi’s technical co-founder when it launched in 2016, and built the initial offering before shifting his attention to marketing and product work. He left his main role at the employment platform startup in December 2021 and moved to Austin, Texas, but remained on the Humi board until January of this year.
He became interested in cleantech, and incorporated Aalo in 2022 after coming to believe that nuclear power was an important but “misunderstood” energy source that needed modernization. The firm has already completed a pilot factory and a full-scale, non-functional prototype facility.
Feature image courtesy Aalo Atomics.