US-based start-up Last Energy has raised $40m for its Series B financing round, which closed earlier this year, bringing the total capital raised to $64m since the company’s founding in 2019. The company is developing a 20 MWe modular microreactor, the PWR-20, designed to be fabricated, transported, and assembled within 24 months, and is sized to serve private industrial customers. Last Energy says it will own and operate the plant on the customer’s site, “bypassing the decade-long development timelines of electric transmission grid upgrade requirements”.
The Series B funding will enable the company to continue expanding its team and invest in project development with the aim of deploying its first plant in 2026. Investors for the round include Gigafund, the Autodesk Foundation, and a series of family offices.
Last Energy Founder & CEO Bret Kugelmass said 2024 has been a “monumental year” so far. “In the last eight months we released a new prototype, demonstrated our fabrication and transport capabilities, nearly doubled our headcount, and accelerated commercial growth. Closing our Series B was the next step to unlocking key milestones as we continue down the path toward commercial operations.”
Ryan Macpherson, Director of Climate Innovation & Investment at the Autodesk Foundation noted: “By drastically simplifying the design-construction-operations process, leveraging technology and talent from Autodesk, Last Energy’s approach to micro-modular nuclear power has the potential to fundamentally change how we think about energy production – offering a rapid, scalable, and economically viable solution to decarbonise heavy industry.”
Last Energy announced agreements for 34 units in 2023 and began 2024 with agreements for 50 units, aiming to build 10,000 units in the next 15 years. Of the 84 units agreed, 39 will be built to serve data centre developers with intensive energy needs for services such as AI and cloud computing. The company says it focuses “all technological innovation on high throughput manufacturability, rather than the industry’s historical focus on novel reactor core physics”.
In April 2024, Last Energy showcased a model prototype of its nuclear reactor module at Data Center World and has plans for two new prototypes, which will be revealed in 2025.
“Data centres and heavy industry are trying to grapple with a very complex set of energy challenges, and Last Energy has seen them realise that micro-nuclear is the only capable solution,” Kugelmass said. “More than ever, data centres need technologies that can simultaneously provide energy abundance, ensure energy security, and enable decarbonisation. Nuclear power is the only resource that can check all of those boxes on paper, but it will only be feasible if nuclear development becomes faster and more affordable in practice. Last Energy is doing that by miniaturising, modularising, and productising nuclear plants, which is critical to unlock nuclear energy at scale.”
Last Energy announced that it has reached 70 full-time staff, hiring 31 new employees since August 2023. Additions over the last 12 months include a global head of safety and licensing, regulatory leads for Last Energy’s target markets (Poland, Romania, and the UK), and a CEO of the company’s UK subsidiary, Last Energy UK.
