Bluecore Energy raises $10M to build nuclear reactors on barges

Bluecore Energy said Tuesday it had raised $10 million in a pre-seed round led by Slauson & Co. Founded seven months ago by Kofi Asante, a former Uber Freight employee, the maritime nuclear energy startup is building small modular reactors (SMRs) on floating barges aimed at providing clean power to ports and nearby infrastructure.

The reactors heat water and route the resulting steam into a generator that spins a turbine to produce electricity, Asante said, in a closed-loop, water-cooled system. Because the barges themselves can be moved by ship to their next location, Bluecore says the emissions involved in relocating them are reduced to zero, and the whole system needs refueling only once every few years. The barges can dock near communities and connect to the power grid through subsea cables; Asante says the goal is power equivalent to roughly 15,000 homes, or enough to meet the needs of a major port. “We are able to utilize existing water-cooled nuclear technology that has been operating for over 70 years,” he told TechCrunch, adding that a production line of rapidly deployable small modular reactors could provide clean energy to “the majority of the country.”

Bluecore will use the new capital to deploy its product. It has already secured a port terminal, a barge, and a test reactor pressure vessel, which Asante said lets the company simulate water flow — the system’s cooling source — while combining hardware and software testing to validate its design. The startup is also working with regulatory agencies to build multiple layers of safety and redundancy into its first product, including cladding the uranium in a thick steel pressure vessel padded with concrete shielding and a steel lining.

Asante is betting Bluecore can also help meet the power demand from the ongoing data center buildout, saying AI data center executives have told him they wouldn’t need to draw water or energy from surrounding communities if they had their own electricity source and access to seawater. Slauson & Co. led the round; other investors include Harlem Capital, Precursor Ventures, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, actor Kevin Hart’s HartBeat Ventures, and several angel investors.

Why it matters

If Bluecore’s floating reactors clear regulatory hurdles, they offer data centers and ports a way to add power without straining local grids or water supplies — a pitch tuned directly to the infrastructure bottleneck now facing AI buildouts.