Micro-nuclear power plant developer Last Energy announced that it has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round closed earlier this year, with proceeds to be used to support the deployment of its first microreactor plant.

Founded in 2019, Washington, D.C.-based Last Energy develops small, 20 MWe nuclear power plants, aimed at bringing nuclear energy to scale, and enabling clean energy access and decarbonization. According to Last Energy, its offerings address key shortcomings of nuclear deployment, such as cost and complexity, with plants that are micro-scale, completely modular, and mass-manufacturable, and providing advantages over renewable energy, with microreactors offering significantly higher energy capacity, requiring minimal land, and avoiding investments in energy storage.

According to Last Energy, the company’s first product, the PWR-20 micro-nuclear power plant, is “comprised of a few dozen modules that snap together like a LEGO kit,” and is designed to be fabricated, transported, and assembled within 24 months, and sized to serve private industrial companies. Under the company’s development model, Last Energy owns and operates its plants on customers’ sites, avoiding the long development pipelines of electric transmission grid upgrade requirements.

Last Energy said that the new capital will be used to help the company expand its team and to invest in product development as it works to deploy its first plant, with a 2026 targeted online date, adding that it has reached commercial agreements for 80 units to date – up from 50 at the start of the year – including 39 units  which will be built to serve data center developers.

Notably, several tech giants over the past few months, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon, have highlighted increased energy needs to meet the AI-driven growth in data centers as a key challenge to their decarbonization goals.

Bret Kugelmass, Founder and CEO of Last Energy, said:

“Data centers and heavy industry are trying to grapple with a very complex set of energy challenges, and Last Energy has seen them realize that micro-nuclear is the only capable solution. More than ever, data centers need technologies that can simultaneously provide energy abundance, ensure energy security, and enable decarbonization. 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 added that it has set a goal to build 10,000 units in the next 15 years.

Investors in the Series B round included Gigafund, the Autodesk Foundation, and a series of family offices. With the closing of the round, Last Energy has raised $64 million in capital to date.

Ryan Macpherson, Director of Climate Innovation & Investment at the Autodesk Foundation, said:

“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 decarbonize heavy industry.”