A blank-check company led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and investor Michael Klein plans to take a Silicon Valley nuclear energy startup public more than two years after the pair first partnered to create the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
Altman and Klein's SPAC, AltC Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: ALCC), said Tuesday it would merge with Santa Clara-based Oklo Inc. in a deal that is expected to provide the combined company with up to $500 million in gross capital. The merger valued Oklo at $850 million, according to a news release. Before the announcement, Oklo had raised upwards of $25 million in venture funding and was last valued at $51.5 million, according to PitchBook Data.
Altman, who is the cofounder and CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI LLC, first got involved with Oklo in 2013 with he met the company's founders, Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte. The next year, Altman — then president of Y Combinator — recruited Oklo into the high-profile startup accelerator. In 2015, he became Oklo's chairman.
“I think the two most important inputs to a great future are abundant intelligence and abundant energy,” said Altman, who will continue on as Oklo’s Chairman. “I have long been interested in the potential that nuclear energy offers to provide clean, reliable, and affordable energy at great scale … It has been a pleasure to be involved with Oklo over the last eight years and I strongly believe it is the best positioned player to pursue commercialization of advanced fission energy solutions.”
The net proceedings from the SPAC merger will go directly to Oklo’s technological developments; the company Oklo has been focused on providing clean energy solutions through nuclear fission developments.
According to the release, 100% of equity held by shareholders will roll over to the combined company.
“We created this company on the basis that it would be shareholder friendly,” Klein, chairman of AltC and CEO of Churchill Capital, said in an investor meeting Tuesday.
The proposed merger comes at a time when venture capital investing in climate technology has been at an all-time low. Since a record high of investment at $14.9 billion in 2021, the space hit a low of $5.8 billion at the end of this year's first quarter — down 61% from the peak.
SPACs saw a peak in mergers at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic but has since seen a downward spiral. Generally, SPACs were an alternative for companies that had little or no revenue to go public, and they made getting to Wall Street an easier endeavor for a tech company.
When Altman and Klein launched AltC Acquisition Corp. in early 2021, they had hoped to raise $1 billion through the SPAC. But within a few months, as interest in the SPAC approach to getting to Wall Street waned, that figure got pruned back by 60%.
As originally written, this story suggested that the merger between Oklo Inc. and AltC Acquisition Corp. had been completed. That was incorrect and the story has been updated to say that a merger between the startup and the special purpose acquisition company had been proposed.
