Two-month-old nuclear startup raises $50m after $10m pre-seed

Bluecore Energy said on Tuesday it had raised $50 million in an oversubscribed seed round. It came out of stealth in July, having raised a $10 million pre-seed.

Silverton Partners led the round. It took eight weeks to close.

The company was founded earlier this year by Kofi Asante. It builds small nuclear reactors on floating barges rather than fixed sites, with the aim of supplying power to ports and the infrastructure around them.

The pitch is mobility. Asante told TechCrunch that the US Navy had run portable reactors for 70 years without an accident, and that shrinking the technology means equipment can be moved in days rather than years.

Asante said he had not planned to raise money this year, but calls kept coming after the pre-seed. Several pre-seed backers went again, including Slauson & Co., Harlem Capital and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen.

New money came from Collab Capital, Kevin Hart's HartBeat Ventures, and angel investors the company describes as coming from Tesla, Uber, Amazon and Google. Terms and valuation were not disclosed.

On the company's account, it became the first nuclear company headquartered at a major port when it left stealth, at the Port of Long Beach. It says it has since put two floating barges in the water.

Bluecore says it has struck a partnership with the Department of Transportation's Maritime Division, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Coast Guard. Its product design is now in review with the NRC and the Coast Guard.

Success there would lead to certification of the floating plant. Asante said talks had run since the company's inception but that formal engagement only began in August.

The new capital goes on product development, regulatory work, nuclear fuel purchases and hiring. Asante said Bluecore already has barges and a reactor and is about to order fuel for delivery to a partner at a national nuclear laboratory.

He named supply chain as the biggest expected problem: securing hardware fast enough to match demand. He said the team comes from SpaceX, Rivian and Toyota, and is applying those companies' approaches to critical parts.

Demand, for now, is described rather than counted. Asante said there had been inbound interest from multiple ports, AI data centres and communities needing clean energy and water. No customer contracts or revenue figures have been disclosed.

That is the shape of the bet. Investors have put $60 million into a company a few months old, whose product cannot legally operate until a federal review that started in August concludes, and whose order book is not public.

For founders raising in hardware, the useful detail is not the headline number but the sequencing. Bluecore had physical assets in the water and a named regulatory process underway before the seed closed, and the round took eight weeks. Slide decks did not do that work; barges did.