Blue Energy, a Bethesda startup looking to build modular nuclear reactors at shipyards, has emerged from stealth after raising $45 million from outside investors to secure regulatory approvals and fuel its hiring ambitions.
The company, founded in 2023 by CEO Jake Jurewicz and Matt Slotkin, will relocate the reactors once built to serve data centers and other high-energy users.
The Series A announced Tuesday was co-led by Cambridge, Massachusetts, investor Engine Ventures and San Francisco venture capital firm At One Ventures. Other funders included Angular Ventures, Nucleation Capital, Propeller Ventures, Starlight Ventures and Tamarack Global.
In a phone interview, Slotkin told me the company's 50- to 300-megawatt reactors can be built in as little as two years by using pre-existing infrastructure and skilled labor at shipyards. Traditional reactors can take up to a decade to produce and come with heavy construction and interest costs.
Blue Energy plans to assume the costs of building and operating its nuclear reactors as it looks to take on the role of a utility provider, selling the power to customers directly.
"The short of it was, we wanted to take nuclear power outside of a construction context — outside of this on-site, bespoke, multibillion dollar construction context — and bring it into an assembly line manufacturing context," Slotkin said. "This is how we've seen all sorts of great decreases in costs in all sorts of different industries, and the question was, could we do this for nuclear?"
He said the eight-person company, which is now hiring for 22 roles as a result of this funding, is on track to obtain the necessary certifications from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the next few years to begin manufacturing nuclear reactors in viable shipyards. It located in Bethesda to be near regulators.
Blue Energy has identified Port Babcock Rosyth in the U.K., where it also has an office, as a candidate but doesn't envision it being difficult to find a U.S. site soon given the history of American shipyards and nuclear energy.
"Most nuclear reactors today are on submarines or aircraft carriers that are made in shipyards," Slotkin said. "This is in many ways not that interesting of an idea. And actually, our most successful nuclear programs are those where we continue to have reliable assembly line manufacturing of these things."
He said Blue Energy has a letter of intent from a large data center and cloud provider that has agreed to host a reactor and buy energy from the company. Showing demand is critical as part of the NRC's approval process to develop and build nuclear reactors in the U.S., Slotkin said.
Blue Energy is not generating revenue at this time, he said.
Slotkin co-founded AI video company Vowel before its acquisition by online automation tool maker Zapier. He also led the engineering team in the Systemized Intelligence Lab at Westport, Connecticut, investment firm Bridgewater Associates.
Jurewicz, the company's CEO, co-founded another energy startup, Entropy Power, and was on the corporate strategy team at Exelon Corp., the Chicago utility company that owned Pepco. He holds a master's in nuclear science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Blue Energy's emergence from stealth follows a Series B secured by another nuclear energy startup in Greater Washington. In August, D.C. nuclear power startup Last Energy raised $40 million to bring its small-scale power plants to markets across Europe.
