Valar Atomics in talks to raise funding at $6B valuation

Valar Atomics, a startup building small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) — factory-built power plants designed to be cheaper and faster to deploy than traditional reactors — is in talks to raise a new round of capital, according to three sources familiar with the company. The El Segundo, California-based startup is seeking a valuation of about $6 billion, with Sequoia expected to lead the deal, the people said. The Information, a subscription tech-business publication, first reported the funding talks, including that Valar is raising a $1 billion equity round.

Part of that capital has been raised previously at a lower valuation, the people told TechCrunch: Valar has raised $450 million — $340 million in equity and $110 million in debt — at a $2 billion valuation, according to a Bloomberg report from March. Such multi-tranche deals, struck at varying valuations and sometimes at different times, have become common in the current AI-fueled fundraising environment; they can create the impression that all capital came in at one uniform price, when investors in the same round may actually pay different prices — a distinction that matters more as outsiders benchmark red-hot startups against each other. Sequoia and Valar declined to comment.

Earlier this month, Valar showed its reactor supplying a small amount of power to an Nvidia AI chip, and the two companies announced a partnership to explore nuclear energy for future AI data centers. The talks come as data-center electricity demand is projected to grow sharply in the coming years while utilities in many regions remain years from adding enough capacity — a gap that has turned nuclear power into one of the most closely watched corners of the AI infrastructure buildout. Valar’s backers include Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar; rivals chasing the same opportunity include Kairos Power, Bill Gates-backed TerraPower, and NuScale Power, the only SMR developer with U.S. regulatory design approval, which won approval for an upgraded, higher-output design last year.

Valar’s technology relies on a helium-cooled, high-temperature gas reactor; the company says it eventually plans to build hundreds of SMRs for data centers, though the technology remains nascent and it’s not at all clear how long industrial-scale deployment will take. Valar has also taken an aggressive legal stance toward its regulator: last year it joined several states and rival startups in suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the U.S. nuclear regulator), arguing the agency wrongly applies its lengthy licensing process for full-size commercial plants to small test reactors. Both sides have repeatedly paused the unresolved litigation, suggesting a settlement may be in the works. Valar was founded by Isaiah Taylor, now 27, who dropped out of high school at 16 and had launched two startups before Valar; his great-grandfather, he has said, worked as a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project.

Why it matters

The financing structure underscores a broader shift toward multi-tranche funding rounds that can obscure a startup’s true valuation, while Valar’s rise shows nuclear power’s growing pull as a proposed fix for the electricity crunch behind the AI data-center boom.