Last Energy raises $40m in Series B funding round

The round brings total capital raised to $64m since the company was founded in 2019.

Last Energy’s Series B will enable the company to continue expanding its team and invest in project development as it works to deploy its first plant, targeting 2026 to come online. Investors for the round include Gigafund, the Autodesk Foundation, and a series of family offices. 

In a statement, Bret Kugelmass, founder and CEO of Last Energy said: “2024 has been a monumental year for Last Energy 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.”

“We are excited to support Last Energy as they trailblaze a new era in clean and reliable energy,” said Ryan Macpherson, director of Climate Innovation & Investment at the Autodesk Foundation. “By drastically simplifying the design-construction-operations process…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.”

In addition to its Series B, the company also announced that it has reached commercial agreements for 80 units. Last Energy announced agreements for 34 units in 2023 and began 2024 with agreements for 50 units. Of Last Energy’s agreements, 39 of the 80 units will be built to serve data centre developers. The company added that it aims to build 10,000 units in the next 15 years.

“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,” said Kugelmass. “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 said its goal is to ‘turbocharge nuclear growth by addressing the shortcomings of traditional nuclear development’. By building 20MWe plants that are micro-scale, completely modular, and mass-manufacturable, Last Energy’s delivery model is claimed to significantly reduce the time and cost to deploy units. 

To demonstrate this, Last Energy’s PWR-20 plant is comprised of a few dozen modules that ‘snap together’. The PWR-20 is designed to be fabricated, transported, and assembled within 24 months, and is sized to serve private industrial customers. Under its development model, Last Energy owns and operates its plug-and-play power plant on the customer’s site, bypassing the development timelines of electric transmission grid upgrade requirements.