Fund II enables professional investors to participate meaningfully in the energy transition
Nucleation Capital Fund II focuses on investing into the best ventures innovating in next-generation nuclear and climate technologies critical to the world’s ability to phase out fossil fuels while growing reliable and resilient grids everywhere. Much like our Fund I, Nucleation Capital will utilize our decades of nuclear industry experience and knowledge of the technologies, national labs, strategic partners, and markets to build a diversified portfolio that optimizes exposure to the growth of these critical sectors and maximizes our returns from the outsized success of leading ventures. Fund II will skew slightly later stage than Fund I and participate with larger checks, including into later-stage, follow-on funding rounds in ventures succeeding to meet milestones and gain traction towards commercialization.
Get better exposure to next-generation nuclear
If you are managing a large portfolio, despite efforts to diversify, you likely have very minor exposure to traditional nuclear and no advanced nuclear power. This is understandable. Until just recently, most fund managers used negative screens to exclude nuclear power from portfolios, and venture funds largely ignored nuclear innovation, except for an occasional bet on fusion. But now is the time to change that.
Nuclear power’s growth prospects have risen dramatically as large customers are showing up en masse, demanding energy. In mid-2024, the large tech hyper-scalers—after decades of trying to decarbonize with renewables—began scrambling to lock up as much nuclear power as they could. Amazon bought the nuclear-powered Cumulus Data Center from Talen. Microsoft partnered with Constellation to purchase 20 years of power from a restarted Three Mile Island reactor. Google partnered with Kairos Power to deliver power from a quantity of Kairos' yet approved advanced Hermes reactors. More companies are seeking to access nuclear power, so retired plants are being restarted, plants whose construction stopped are being started up again, and orders for advanced designs are stacking up.
There’s just not enough nuclear power available to meet the demand for clean, reliable, resilient, high-capacity energy, so the race is on to build more. Much of that growth will come from innovative fourth-generation (Gen IV) reactor designs that make nuclear power easier to build, more efficient, safer, cheaper, and better suited to a wider range of energy needs than previously seen.
When you combine escalating demand, technological breakthroughs, federal policies supporting the fuel cycle development, and accelerating review and approval of competing advanced nuclear designs with global urgency to transition away from fossil fuels, we see nuclear energy in a position not just for an ordinary “renaissance” but to finally arrive and fulfill its destiny as the "future of energy." We believe there will be a rich abundance of superior product offerings that commence factory deliveries and compete on feature sets, size, and price to meet the broad needs of an advanced and complex energy market that is beyond ready to relegate fossil fuels to the past forever.
The convergence of these factors now prompts professional investors and even institutional LPs to seriously consider nuclear's potential to succeed in the multi-trillion-dollar markets now held by coal, oil, and gas. It remains impossible to know which ventures will succeed and which will fail but it is possible to have experts provide more knowledgible discernment into this deeply technical sector to assess actual status rather than handwaving. That is what Nucleation Capital provides, having already been investing in advanced nuclear for the last five years, with decades of prior nuclear industry, technology development, venture capital and investment management experience. We bring both a passion for nuclear and a deeper understanding of what it takes to deliver nuclear power, products or services within the expected time frames, where so much of the overall success of any venture requires a whole host of actors supplying the parts, materials, fuels, services, software, training, and project integration needed broadly across this rapidly growing sector. This is our wheelhouse, and Nucleation Capital aims to build the best portfolio possible to boost LP exposure to the technologies and ventures that have the greatest prospects of delivering “the future of energy.”
If interested in Fund II . . .
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