Nuclear Startup Valar Atomics in Talks for $6 Billion Valuation After Power Milestone
The Takeaway
- Valar Atomics is raising $1 billion at a $5 billion, pre-money valuation
- The nuclear startup reached an important milestone earlier this month
- Valar in July also announced a partnership with Nvidia for data center powered by its reactors
Valar Atomics, a three-year-old startup that makes small nuclear reactors intended to power data centers and other industrial facilities, is in talks to raise $1 billion at around a $5 billion valuation before the investment, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.
Sequoia Capital, which hasn’t previously disclosed an investment in Valar, has been in talks to lead the fundraising, which could be a mix of debt and equity, the person said.
The funding round hasn’t yet closed, so terms could change. Valar raised $130 million at an undisclosed valuation in November. Snowpoint Ventures led that round, and angel investors such as Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir Technologies’ chief technology officer Shyam Shankar participated. It’s unclear if the company has closed another fundraising round, at a $2 billion valuation, reported by Bloomberg earlier this year.
The latest fundraising talks come less than two weeks after Valar reached an important milestone at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab, a test site where it produced power in the reactor it built through a self-perpetuating chain reaction. This could help it on its path to commercializing the technology in the next few years.
Valar aims to mass produce small reactors to power industrial facilities and data centers through nuclear campuses, known as gigasites. In early July, Valar announced a partnership with chipmaker Nvidia to construct a small data center run on Valar’s reactors.
The Hawthorne, Calif.-based startup is among a growing cohort of energy startups attempting to capitalize on the AI boom—and investor interest—by pitching themselves as new sources of clean, reliable energy to AI companies and data centers.
In June, for example, Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup, raised $465 million in a funding round led by Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital at a roughly $15 billion valuation before the investment, The Information reported.
Valar founder and CEO Isaiah Taylor, a 27-year-old high school dropout and former automotive entrepreneur, has argued that building small modular reactors which can generate up to one-third as much electricity as conventional nuclear power plants, are faster and cheaper to manufacture than standard plants.
“I wanted to fix the problem of nuclear energy,” Taylor told The Information in an interview in March. Taylor hopes to make reactors prolific and efficient to build, “more like you build cars or airplanes—and less like you build bridges and roads,” he said.