Tech Titans: Funding and Building the Safest Nuclear Reactor with Matt Loszak, Aalo Atomics

Matt Loszak (0:00)

I think it's just worth saying that nuclear really will be the cheapest energy source by far. It's equivalent energy content to 2 million barrels of oil and gas.

For our technology, we're really trying to make these reactors as safe as a university research reactor. So a lot of people, they don't realize there's around 30 nuclear reactors on university campuses. And students walk by these things without even knowing they're there. And the reason that is, is because it has this special fuel called uranium zirconium hydride. Most research reactors use this fuel, which has this kind of incredible safety mechanism where the hotter the fuel gets, the less reactive it gets. So it's essentially inherently meltdown proof.

And so for no good reason, and there are some interesting kind of subtleties to this we can get into here, but this fuel has not been used for power production before. And so the idea is, if you want to make nuclear ubiquitous and make these small reactors in a factory that can be deployed all over the place, it should be as safe as a university research reactor that can just go in your backyard and you can feel great about that. So that's essentially what we're trying to do, is make factory-made small nuclear reactors that can be deployed anywhere from power data centers, desalination plants, maybe even one day small communities with not only power, but also the residual heat powering those communities. And I could go on, but that's the core premise. It's interesting, we're taking the venture funding route. And so we've raised a good amount of money relatively quickly. We raised a $6 million seed round within a few months of our inception. And then that was about a year and a few months ago. In the past month, we closed a $27 million Series A.

And that might go up a little bit higher. We'll see, we still have a few active conversations. We might bump that up a little bit more. So more to come there. But then, the plan is to raise more next year for a Series B.

And so, essentially, if you look at the roadmap here, with the Series A, we'll be building a non-nuclear prototype. This will also consist of a number of other subsystem testing. And that's going to be happening over the next, essentially, 6 to 12 months.

But our goal is to get approved to start construction on the first real nuclear version in 2026 This is our internal goal. And so, obviously, to fund that reactor, we'll be announcing more on this later. It'll be a mixture of venture funding, and we're also, of course, going after non-elutive government capital for this as well.

And when we announce more on this, it'll become more clear why that is.

But you're right. There is a lot of capital that has to be raised for this kind of business.

I think one interesting thing there is that people don't often realize, if you look at how much money certain companies in software have raised, like Uber or Airbnb and others, it's relatively on par with companies like SpaceX or Tesla or other deep tech companies in terms of how much venture was raised. And so at scale, it's a comparable amount of money. But I think the thing is just that there's more ways to fail in a deep tech startup than there are in a software company. My last company was a software company. I think if you can sell software to one business, 10 businesses, 100 businesses, you'll always survive. You'll just make different amounts of revenue as a business and so on. Whereas in deep tech, you have to clear a lot more existential hurdles before you actually get to the promised land of, in this case, bankability and being able to actually project finance a reactor project consistently. There's no doubt that to pull something like this off requires a ton of experts and probably a wider array of fields than a lot of other spaces.

So anything from the nuclear physics of it, to the manufacturing of it, to the financing of it and the financial modeling that goes behind that, to the construction, the ongoing operations and maintenance, and so on. So there's a ton of different aspects to this that we need to bring on the top people in the world to help achieve this. Because especially in nuclear, it's critical that you get a lot of stuff right the first time around. There's a lot as much.

In rocketry, you can blow up a few rockets as you're learning. In nuclear, you can't really blow up a few reactors on your way to learning there.