Valar Atomics raises $1B Series B led by Sequoia after becoming first startup to generate nuclear power

Speaker 1: Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And up next, we have Sean McGuire and Isaiah Taylor. Is there a Dynamic duo. Atomic. Two guests. Third, fourth time on the show. How's it going? What's up, guys?

Speaker 3: Tell us the guy. Look at you. Nuclear reactor. Two We gotta get the eagle scream every time. This is, like, this is our intro this morning. So you exactly. What happened? There we go. What happened, guys? What happened? $1,000,000,000 series b. New fish back, baby. With the wind up. Crazy,

Speaker 2: crazy, crazy moment. Where should we start? Isaiah, you wanna kick it off?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I'm right here in the reactor hall right now with the hardware. This is where I like to spend my time. And one thing that was just amazing about Sean's partnership in in getting to know this company is he just wanted to about the hardware. Mhmm. That's really my favorite type of investor. They're like, show me to stop, like, are you actually building things? And I think that's what's special about this company is that we just build, and we build fast. And,

Speaker 1: yeah, it's been really great to to meet the Sequoia team and and get to know everybody. And this facility, the the you're no longer purely in the Gundo. You've expanded. Where is this facility now?

Speaker 3: So this is our Orangeville, Utah site. Utah. It's our first first nuclear site. Yep. Okay. And what are the short,

Speaker 1: medium, long term goals with this site and beyond? Is this still an r and d site, or is this gonna be generating power? When when do you start building the factory that build the machine that builds the machine?

Speaker 3: Yeah. So we've already made a tiny bit of nuclear power here. We became the first startup in history to make nuclear power about a month ago. And but it's still a test unit. And what we're building toward is something that we call a Gigasite. These are massive campuses of reactors, and we think they'll make the cheapest energy on Earth. And so that's what we're working toward here. And it starts right here in Utah for sure. This is a great place to serve data centers, AI factories, and eventually all of the industrial stack that has been falling behind in The United States. It depends on energy. Aluminum electrolysis, steel, you know, all of the the different input metals to to making everything in the physical world starts on our our giga sites. So that's what's coming next and that's really what this raise is is gonna help support.

Speaker 2: Massive. Sean, I have to assume you've met every nuclear startup. There's a lot of them, but you've got enough time in the day to meet them all. I don't know. I doubt there's so many different applications of the technology. There's a lot of different ones. It's

Speaker 6: not only Valor, but there's only one Isaiah. That's for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So talk about what drew And you to the this is not

Speaker 6: a series A check. This is a billion dollar check. No, it's a big check. This is a big boy check here. This is an ultra high conviction investment. Look, I'm a former physicist. Have a PhD in physics. I've loved nuclear since I was a little kid. I was hoping that, you know, I read Richard Rhodes' Manhattan Project book when I was like 17, and I've kind of been waiting for there to be an opportunity in nuclear. Currently, I didn't think it was going to happen. I thought we were just going to go like solar battery or solar plus some other storage mechanism future, just given how regulated nuclear was. It just didn't seem like it would be possible to get to scale. And then two things happened. One, power became important in the West again, which is pretty amazing. Second, this administration but I gotta say this, I think, a very bipartisan thing. Both the Democrats and Republicans as power became a bottleneck have been pushing for more favorable, you know, nuclear regulation, and it's starting to happen. So even three years ago, I just think the regulatory side was too scary for me. So we've had kind of regulatory breakthroughs with this next generation of founders that are, you know, really trying to bring in this nuclear future. But for me with Isaiah, there are few things. One, just like when you get to know this guy, the level of intensity is psychopathic. And I mean this in the best of sense, but like the day he went critical in this reactor he's in, first of all, like he thought he was going to go critical the day before It ended up being the next day, so he was up kind of all night, two nights in a row. Then that night that he went critical, they didn't go critical on, like, 9PM or something. There was a candidate he wanted to close whose partner was in San Francisco. So the day he went critical after not sleeping for two days, he got in an airplane that night to fly to San Francisco to have drinks with, you know, a candidate and the the guy's wife. I don't know what time he went to sleep. And then the next day, he's back in, you know, I think it was Utah, maybe Los Angeles. But getting to know Isaiah, the level of intensity is just absolutely incredible. Candidly, the only person I don't know many people that have this level of intensity. And then just one more thing. Something that I learned, like a lesson, a mistake I made in the space industry was, you know, Elon started off trying to build the Falcon one, which was a pretty simple rocket relative to, you know, what NASA could do in the, you know, eighties, nineties. It was like a nineteen sixties rocket or maybe even earlier. And there were all these other companies that were telling these, like, advanced science stories. We're gonna use carbon fiber, you know, big frames to have, you know, less mass, or we're going to three d print the rocket. So other people were like trying to do this very advanced technology to have better mass ratios, etcetera. And Elon was like, I'm going to do the simplest thing possible, put up one satellite, you know, get that revenue and then go from there to something that's, you know, Falcon nine, pretty damn hard, but still not state of the art compared to what NASA had done in say the nineties. And then from there, go to what's truly state of the art, reusability. And then from there, go to Starship, is just completely pushing the limit. And Isaiah understands that he's the only he's one of the only founders I've ever met ever in any industry that like really understands the power of starting with the simplest unit where you can actually scale and and, like, win and then climbing from there. So anyways, Isaiah should do the rest of the talking.

Speaker 2: That was great.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I I think that's one thing that Sean and I just connected on very early is, like, lots of investors trying to understand the nuclear space want to know what's special about this technology, what's really unique about this technology. They they want to find this sort of, like, IP technical edge where you're doing some special sauce that that nobody else is doing. And my approach is like, no. Like, we want this reactor to be as simple as we possibly can. Like, if we could just staple this thing together from IKEA, then this would be a trillion dollar company much faster. Mhmm. And so there's like two two philosophies that we use in in building the reactors. We try to buy things that are completely off the shelf, like a 100% commodity, or we make it ourselves, and there's very few things in between. Right? There's very few places where we have a supply chain that's dependent upon the existing nuclear industry. Because if you think about it, we're trying to go a 100 times faster than the nuclear industry's ever gone before. And so if we're plugging too deeply into the existing network, it's not gonna work that well. So we wanna use standard off the shelf things and and make things ourselves where we can't buy something off the off the shelf. And by necessity, that means the design the design is extremely, extremely simple. The more complexity you add to it, the harder it is to do one of those two options and the harder it is to scale. So, you know, I think especially in nuclear, this is a difficult thing because it's it's full of very smart people. It's full of physics people and PhDs and people who have spent their life doing complex analysis. And they actually want something that is a little bit complicated. It's like it's an ego thing to to design something that is like complicated and looks very sophisticated. And we have just really rooted that out of our our minds at Valor. Like, we work extremely hard to root that mentality out. Like, it's it's our preference that this thing is so simple that somebody with nuclear PhD looks at is, that's like a toy. And it's like, great, because people make toys in like the millions. Right? They just like stamp them out. And that's exactly what we wanna do. And then the other aspect that's super unique here is just the safety of the overall architecture lends itself to this approach. If you build a really, really safe reactor, you're also, by necessity, building a really safe reactor because most of the engineering complexity in nuclear comes from safety engineering. If you look at a modern pressurized water reactor plant, they're very complicated, and 90% of the complexity comes from trying to make it safe. So the approach that we've taken instead is design it to be safe from the physics, and you can actually just delete a huge amount of the bill of materials. Just, like, completely remove it. It doesn't even exist in our in our bomb. So those are the the philosophies we've we've taken here. And,

Speaker 6: yeah, like, listen, I can't give enough credit to Sean in particular and also the rest of This is all Isaiah. This is this guy's building nuclear reactors. I'm wiring money. Like, get out of here. I gotta give a couple shout outs, though. I gotta shout out Palmer Lucky Yeah. Who gave me the hat tip that this is a special company. Thank you, Palmer. Yeah. Hat tip to Liam Corrigan, you know, newest investor at Sequoia, who was my wingman here, physics guy Yeah. Rhodes Scholar, Olympic gold medalist rower, six five Chad.

Speaker 3: Total Chad. Total Chad.

Speaker 6: And Max Eucoprena, who's on the team at Valor, is someone I've known since I was a kid, who for years was trying to get me to come meet this company. Was like, oh, dude. Nuclear is too hard. Regulatory is not favorable. And anyways, Max, I look stupid. Good job.

Speaker 2: How Isaiah, how have the have there been talent wars in in nuclear? You know, you're flying on on such an important day to go to go meet someone, which many founders will have done, but that's felt like maybe urgent. How intense has the competition for talent been this round? Imagine will give you a lot of advantages just having get more firepower to to continue compounding a great team. But walk us through the last maybe two years in the category.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Look, I I view my job essentially as trying to get the most talented people in the world to come and build this mission with me. There there are no blockers in in front of us. Like, we we have a regulatory environment that's ready to move. We have an enormous demand signal. We have customers that wanna buy. We have an architecture that's very simple and very scalable. And now we have a lot of capital in the bank. And the blocker on us becoming the, you know, $10.50, a $100,000,000,000,000 company that makes most of the world's energy is the smartest people in the world coming and and joining us in this mission. So I spend an enormous amount of time and of my time doing that. I actually would say that our our primary talent competition is in other places where you can move the needle on a global scale that need incredibly talented engineers. I I don't I don't see it as sort of like, okay, other nuclear companies. It's it's more like, you know, what are the other companies that are genuinely going to change the force of humanity in the next fifty years? And, like, those are the people that that I'm fighting for. Mhmm. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Lessons from I'll just say Yo. Sorry. Hey. Well, if I can say one thing on that, something I've seen from Isaiah that is very rare,

Speaker 6: he is looking for just ultra talented generalists, and he tests people like crazy. Real world tests, know, like, Hey, I'm going to be in someone says, Hey, I want to interview. And he says, Okay, I'm in Texas. Meet me here tomorrow. And if they get to Texas, then they have a shot. And if they don't make it to Texas, then they're weeded out. It's just not having that level of, like, commitment. And anyways, there are not many people that understand you have to kind of design the hiring process to find the people that select into a crazy mission. High agency. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah. You're revealing SpaceX. You're revealing the secrets here, Sean. Like, you know, this I know. Now the next now the now the next three are gonna show up to the meeting, and I'll have to figure out some some other way to weed them out. Absolutely. Yeah. That is it's very true. If they show up, it's still a good it's true. It's just still a great sign.

Speaker 1: Lessons from SpaceX. One of the interesting Yeah. I can imagine.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sorry. I got a dentist appointment in Utah of all places. I gotta get out there. It's like it's about, you know, people being like, yeah. Got a dentist appointment. I have to take three commercial flights, you know, and drive three hours to get my to my dentist appointment. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Of the interesting SpaceX stories is residual capability. They build all this launch capacity. They have maybe too much launch capacity. You get Starlink, amazing business, becomes a telecom company, not probably not in the first pitch deck, Sean, you'd know. But is there a world where there's a residual capability from what you're building here where you're using the electrons that you're generating yourself? Or do you see there's just, like, so much demand that just that that's something that's, like, is very, very unlikely to happen?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, look. You you know and you and I have talked about this before. Like, I think Valor actually started I look, I grew up watching Elon. Right? I I watched I read everything that I could about the Falcon one and the Falcon nine and saw this very simple path that you just call it flight rate. I think it's SpaceX. We call it tick rate. Tick rate is basically how quickly can you go from cores turning on, you know, each one. It's it's like a look back average metric of the time between new cores turning on. And it is predictive of who's gonna win, who's gonna have the lowest cost and the highest capacity, and all these different things. And we actually started with the idea of that excess capacity and being able to make the world's commodities. Right? Yep. And I think that the AI thing happening as quickly as it did and power prices changing so dramatically where people will sign a $200 PPA is like, okay. Obvious that we should sell electrons. Yep. But no question is our long term vision to actually have the cheapest energy on earth and to use it for our own things. I mean, we see a a vision of the world where steel is just way cheaper than it is today. Aluminum is way cheaper than it is today. The manipulation of matter is a lot cheaper because you have robotics hooked up to AI that's doing matter manipulation and vision, and all these things just take energy. And so it'll be interesting to see, like, where we decide to play in the stack. I think, like, we want to be in the in the business of turning on thousands of reactors primarily, but there will be a couple of, like, massive massive markets that we attach to that that we can just make at a competitive price that no one else in the world think that. And also,

Speaker 1: like, the nature of the AI boom is that you need a lot of energy in a single place, which is perfectly suited for you as opposed to Exactly. If we were in some boom where we need everyone in their pocket needs twice as much energy, you would have to Yeah. Maybe transform into another source of energy or do something else in the supply chain. Sean?

Speaker 6: Did you have something? I no. I agree. I concur.

Speaker 1: By all in agreement. Fantastic.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Well Honestly, I was just gonna say that's the the AI the AI thing, like, perfectly matches gigasites. Yeah. Right? Like, the the the idea is nuclear is a thing that benefits from extreme scale. Yeah. Like, you could build a thousand nuclear reactors right next to each other, you should. Like, you will get the cheapest energy anywhere in the universe if you do that. Mhmm. And so AI is, like, the the perfect thing to do with that first. But we will do many, many interesting things with it over the next century. Well, congratulations. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Excited for you guys to partner up. We'll talk to you. You. To see you. Fun. Peace. Goodbye. Alright. Cheers. Bye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. We're going back to back energy