Valar Atomics raises $130M Series A to mass-produce standardized nuclear reactors and cut energy costs 10x

Speaker 2: What happened today?

Speaker 4: Yeah. First of all, the Eagle Screech was fantastic timing there because we have our beautiful nuclear test site out in the back here, in the middle of Utah Desert. Fantastic job producers. Yeah. We That was me. That was me.

Speaker 8: That's Jordy soundboard. Jordy.

Speaker 4: When they saw my background. Yeah. And then you could hit play.

Speaker 2: For sure.

Speaker 1: We got so many sounds. We got here. I got I got sounds for Dave.

Speaker 4: That's exactly what it sounds like when one of our nuclear reactors starts up. That's nice. No. It's we're having a great day. It's it's an amazing day for Valoratomics. We announced a $130,000,000 series a earlier today. Fantastic. Let's go.

Speaker 2: Nice. Congratulations.

Speaker 4: That is a proper gong.

Speaker 2: That's your series a. It's Wait. You I thought It's series a. I feel like you had

Speaker 1: raised a series a before. Wow. No. Is a seed riot? I didn't realize.

Speaker 4: That's right. We announced a a $19,000,000 seed round Okay. Earlier this year.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 4: And and, actually, we built our reactor on a seed round, and we didn't turn it on. So now we have enough capital to go turn it on.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 4: And this is something I'm super proud of the team for, by the way, because I I think this is, how venture's supposed to work. You you hopefully turn something on

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 4: In the in the series a. This is like when you find, you know, product market fit. So I'm super proud of the team. This is our goal. Go split the atom with this capital.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, yeah, the the whole story here makes so much sense because, like, you started with, like, the really, really big vision. Like, turning, you know, nuclear power into energy that could be transported. Actual like, you were gonna synthesize hydrocarbons, and you laid out this big vision. But then that was almost like act three. And then act one was like, can we actually build something that doesn't even turn on but just shows that we can actually build something? Then let's go turn it on. Let's start generating energy. Then if we have abundance and tons of energy, then let's figure out what next to do. And I think people were always, like, a little bit thrown by how far you were thinking into the future, and they were like, well, let's see what this guy can do in six months. And then you delivered on the six month project, and now I think people are are waking up to what you're building. Is that how you've experienced it?

Speaker 4: I think that's that's an accurate perception, and I've certainly learned a little bit about how to pitch the story. We I I talk a little bit more about the short term now, but I think about the long term every single day. Totally. I mean this, I think of this as my life's work. Energy is a very interesting thing where there's obviously an enormous amount of demand already, right? There's trillions of dollars worth of energy demand. But it's one of those things where if you make a lot of it and you make it very cheap, it creates its own demand.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 4: And I don't think there's really a limit to that. Like, the more I play this out in my head, if you can make energy cheaper, you open up these new apertures of places where you can sell it and things that you can do with it. Mhmm. And so that that really is, like, the fundamental motivation and the thing that we're trying to do here is that I think energy should be 10 times cheaper than it is right now. And you're right. That's, like, a really long term vision. Yeah. But you have to be able to be super concrete and build stuff right now, six months, twelve months at a time.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I mean, the original vision, still very cool. I don't think it doesn't sound like you're losing sight of it. I don't think you should. But the I mean, we were just talking to semi analysis about the build out for AI data centers, and it feels like energy is the bottleneck. The question of we will probably be able to scale up the GPU production, but getting enough energy at the right price is probably gonna be the next thing that we're talking about all next year, the year after. And there's gonna be this question of, like, where's the energy coming from? It's gonna be a political issue if it's oil and gas. Maybe this should be oil and gas in the short term. But in the long term, I think most people agree, nuclear and solar. And so how are you thinking about the broader story here with America's renuclearization? There's a bunch of companies that are working on this. What are the timelines? What are the key things that need to happen? How's that looking?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think AI needs power in the next couple years. That's pretty obvious. And, you know, I was at an event with Tyler Cowen and Sam Altman a couple weeks ago,

Speaker 2: and Yeah.

Speaker 4: Tyler asks him, you know, what's the only thing holding you back? And he says, electrons. Yeah. And Tyler says, anything else? Chips? You know, he's like, electrons. Right? So that's pretty clear. Then the follow-up question was, what's the nearest term way to solve that in in Sam's natural gas? And I would generally agree with that, and I think that's probably true for the next eighteen months. We do want to make power for data centers in 2028 though. And the interesting thing about nuclear is that I believe it scales very differently to natural gas. Natural gas is is very site specific. You need to go find good gas sources. You're you're working on routing. There's all these complicated things. Nuclear, you can kind of do wherever it makes sense, and you can put a lot of it in one place. The reason for this is uranium is just easy to move around, right? It's kind of a year's worth if it fits on a truck, unlike a natural gas pipeline where you're working on the actual in ground logistics of moving gas around. So I think once we've gotten that cracked, like the first unit that's making power, we could just make more of them. And you you end up seeing these big sites that that people are sort of dreaming about today where you have a one, two, three gigawatt, you know, AI data center. This is very easily deliverable with the nuclear reactor that you just mass produce. Right? Because you don't have to worry about these gas logistics.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But how do you decide, like, if we're doing one gigawatt, that means we I mean, the last thing we talked about was, like, maybe targeting 10 megawatts, so you need a 100 of these things. Like, why a 110 megawatts as opposed to a thousand one megawatts or 10 100 megawatts. Right? Like, there's some trade off. How'd you land there?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So our our unit will be a 25 megawatt electric

Speaker 2: 25 megawatt.

Speaker 4: Approximately. Yeah. So that's about 40 reactors 40. Per gigawatt. And really the reason here is I I just think that in the West in the Western world, we're really good at making bus sized objects. And if

Speaker 1: you try

Speaker 4: to make an object bigger than a bus, you have a hard time. Yeah. We're we used to be good at this. Right? We used to be really good at, like, large scale, like, Hoover Dam, style construction, big nuclear reactors. Yeah. Spatial, all this kind of stuff. But if you notice how Elon sort of revolutionized rockets, he actually downsized pretty significantly.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 4: Right? The Falcon nine is a smaller rocket than, you know, any of the the heavy launch vehicles that took us to the moon. And then he kinda slowly worked his way back up to Starship. Mhmm. And even Starship is, like, taking longer than you would have expected. So there's just something about the tool sets that we have, the way that we do engineering that favors making objects smaller and making lots of them. Yeah. So if I'm There's

Speaker 1: a big part like how put

Speaker 2: it on a truck. I talked to some early SpaceX people about that, they're like, you can put the engine on a truck. Once you go any bigger, it's like, get out the crane every single time you wanna do anything. Exactly. And so if you can do just little less crane work, it just compounds and compounds and compounds.

Speaker 1: What are what are the what are the key risks to the business over the next, like, twenty four months that you talk about internally with the team, things that you're trying to prove out? I think somebody, you know, haters could have said, you know, a year or so ago, you can't build a nuclear reactor, with $20,000,000. You you you derisked.

Speaker 2: You'll need a 153.

Speaker 1: You derisked you derisked What

Speaker 4: do think about that?

Speaker 1: From a capital from a capital standpoint. Now, you're much less capital constrained. And you certainly doesn't feel like there's a lot of risk on the demand side, which is like if you can make cheap energy, will people want this? Think, we know the answer there. But what are you what are you kind of like focused on internally?

Speaker 4: Yeah. That's exactly right. And actually, I think people are massively over focusing on every risk except just the technical execution. You mentioned, like, there's a lot of demand. Right? I think you'll see a lot of companies put out MOUs. They'll they'll sign deals. Right? You'll see Mhmm. You know, this company sent a deal deal with Google. This one sent a deal with Amazon, this sort of thing. One of my actually biggest Twitter haters, I'm gonna have to shout out, unfortunately, because he wrote such a good tweet, and somebody sent it to me that I was

Speaker 2: like saw this. It is.

Speaker 4: It's like, damn it. I'm gonna have

Speaker 1: to I'm gonna have to

Speaker 4: shut that one out. And my one of my big Twitter haters, Nick Turan, shout out to you, Nick, said I'm issuing a universal MOU to all nuclear companies. Me, Nick, I'm saying I will buy $10,000,000,000 of energy from any nuclear company that can actually build a nuclear reactor on time and on budget and at a good price. Right? So I think this is actually totally right. Like, there is so much demand, and the thing that's missing is capability. The thing that's missing is actually turning reactors on. So the risk is entirely we have to go build this reactor and turn it on. And this is, I think, essentially what sets Valor apart from basically everybody else in nuclear today is that when we started the company, core conviction was that nuclear has to go back through R and D again. We sort of assumed as an industry that because we've built many nuclear reactors in the past that we still know how to. And I think that's fundamentally wrong. And this is sort of our belief from the beginning that we have to go back through R and D. R and D means starting small, starting low power, building it very quickly, testing it fast, and that will lead us to a commercial unit. But there is just real tech risk along that path. Right? You know, pumps don't work like you thought they would. Seals don't work like, you know, they don't hold as much pressure as you thought and and you iterate through it.

Speaker 2: Is the tech risk I mean, it sounds like the test the tech risk generally is a little bit overrated because this technology fundamentally, like, it did work eight years ago. It did work, you know, in the sixties. I mean, there were some problems in

Speaker 1: certain Yeah. But even going to the moon is somewhat of a lost art.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I get it.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I I would put this into the bucket. It's not science risk, it's it's tech risk. Right? Tech is really about engineering and capital. It's it's about what are your timelines yeah. Economics, engineering, and capital. What are your timelines? How much money do you have and resources to do it in the right timelines? Yeah. And and that's why our focus has been small steps executed extremely quickly. Yeah. I started this company about two years ago. It's been about two years and two months since we started the company. We built our first nuclear reactor within fourteen months of founding the company, and we're gonna hopefully turn it on before the three year mark. And if you can move at that pace, I think you can sort of iterate your way. You you get more shots on goal. Right? Moving quickly means you get lots of shots on goal. So if the seal doesn't work right exactly the first time you do testing, that's fine because you have some time to go and test it and and iterate that seal and that valve.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Are you, moving the family out to Utah yet? Are we gonna see a Valor kind of, like, planned development with a bunch of

Speaker 2: Oh, that feels fair. I'd like to

Speaker 1: see a bunch of mid century homes I like that.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Set up. I will say we do have more RVs than I expected at the site right now and a lot more on on order as well. Yeah. The the housing out here in the desert is gonna be an interesting challenge to solve. We're not just building the reactor building here. We also have a trace of fuel plant that's going up as well. So we're actually gonna be making our own trace of fuel. So, we're gonna have a a really fun operation out here, and that's only the beginning.

Speaker 1: Very cool. Very cool. Congratulations on the progress in the round. Fantastic. I'm super excited for you and the whole team.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Amazing. Awesome group of investors too. I'm I'm I have to shout out Doug Filipone who led this round, ran global defensive talent here Yeah. For, I think, seventeen years. Started Snowpoint, ex Army Ranger, JSOC commander. Awesome, awesome guy. Not in this photo, but I actually arrived on our our site here for the groundbreaking in a Blackhawk helicopter No way. With Doug, which was which was fantastic. It's a great time. The suit the suit and the

Speaker 1: Blackhawk goes unbelievably hard.

Speaker 10: It goes

Speaker 4: quite hard. Fantastic. Hadram Sharath and Richard Blankenship as well from Dream, absolutely made the magic happen on this round too. Fantastic guys. Really, really grateful for for all our investors.

Speaker 2: And Palmer's in. I remember last time me, you, Palmer were together. You guys were in a fierce debate, and you clearly got you wound up seeing eye to eye because now he's in the round, which is, congratulations on that.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're debating about how much uranium we have. Yeah. There's lots of it guys.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4: A lot of uranium to to use. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, someday someday we'll get the fusion, but not before we're all living in, like, O'Neil cylinders, with with more energy than we know what to do with.

Speaker 2: Fantastic. Well, I'm I'm very excited for our nuclear future. I'm excited for what you're building, and, I just wanna say massive congrats. I remember we we filmed a very brief interview, in El Segundo probably around two years ago. You didn't even have an office yet. And Yeah. It's been what a what a fantastic run. Congratulations on all the progress.

Speaker 4: Amazing stuff. Thanks, John Jordy.

Speaker 2: We'll talk to soon.

Speaker 1: See you.

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Speaker 1: I am unfortunately What happened? Away from I was away from home. Oh, you're away

Speaker 2: from home. Yes. You're on the road. I got an 86. Sleep. Seven and a half hours. Our next guest, is Grant from Gamma. He's in the restroom waiting room. Now he's in BTU in all three d. Now this is Hayden. Oh, Hayden first.

Speaker 1: Oh, fantastic. Welcome to show.

Speaker 2: Been an ad, I guess.

Speaker 1: Squeezing in. Super How

Speaker 2: are you doing?

Speaker 1: Super excited to have you on the show here. We have, as as you know, a Uniswap alum Mhmm. Working on the team. We're very very grateful to have him. And it's great to meet you.