Valor Equity Partners leads $100 M Series B financing round closed by Earth VC-backed Aalo Atomics
Valor Equity Partners led the $100 million Series B financing round that was closed by Aalo Atomics, a company that specializes in next-generation nuclear energy.
New and existing investors, including Fine Structure Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Crosscut, NRG Energy, Vamos Ventures, Tishman Speyer, Kindred Ventures, 50Y, Harpoon Ventures, Crescent Enterprises, Alumni Ventures, MCJ, Gaingels, Perpetual VC, Nucleation Capital, and Earth Venture Capital, also participated in the round, according to a statement released by Earth VC on Wednesday.
With criticality anticipated for next summer, the funding will allow Aalo to construct the Aalo-X, its first nuclear power plant, at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The facility will be paired with an experimental data center constructed alongside it in a first-of-its-kind demonstration, and if it is successful, it will be the first advanced nuclear plant to come online in the United States in decades.
In order to power data centers on a large scale, Aalo also intends to scale thousands of Aalo Pods—five Aalo-1 reactors and one turbine per Pod—instead of continuing with its demonstration plant.
In the long run, the company wants to lower electricity prices to 3 cents per kWh, which would make nuclear energy competitive with both natural gas and renewables.
Notably, data center capacity increased by almost 30% in Southeast Asia between 2019 and 2023, contributing to the rapidly increasing demand for electricity as facilities use 4–5 times as much power per square meter as factories.
Due to the increasing demand for digital and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, capacity in India is expected to double by 2026.
The Asia-Pacific region is in dire need of clean, dependable baseload energy, as evidenced by inventory growth of more than 20% year over year and projected shortages of 15–25 GW by 2028.
Aalo’s modular reactors, in contrast to conventional gigawatt-scale nuclear plants, are built for fleet deployment and factory production, allowing them to swiftly and effectively power utilities, industrial clusters, and data centers.
Aalo’s Series B milestone demonstrates Earth VC’s goal of supporting driven deep tech entrepreneurs who can secure prosperity on a living planet and decarbonize emerging Asia.
At the time of Earth VC’s initial investment in Aalo, nuclear power was thought to be too slow and politically challenging.
The potential for modular, small-scale nuclear to meet the demands of rapidly expanding markets, especially in Asia where energy demand and climate goals are most pressing, was something that Earth VC saw that many others missed.
According to the statement, today’s oversubscribed $100 million round shows that nuclear power will be crucial in enabling AI and decarbonization, a fact that is becoming increasingly acknowledged worldwide.
