Nuclear startup Bluecore Energy raises $50M seed round, just two months after launch; plus, Poseidon Aerospace eyes first pilotless test flight, and Stoke Space raises another billion

0:00This is TechCrunch. Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyam, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the story is moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we play in personal finance strategies and dive into the industry as shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing and of course stock ideas plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. On Tuesday, Bluecore Energy announced an oversubscribed $50 million seed round just months after raising a $10 million pre-seed and coming out of stealth. As TechCrunch previously reported, the company founded earlier this year by Kofi Asanti,

1:00builds small, nuclear reactors on floating barges rather than fixed locations to generate clean energy for ports and nearby infrastructure. This means that energy can be transported to wherever it is needed. An idea Asanti hopes can bring clean power to those who need it most. He said, the Navy is doing this as we speak for the last 70 years and has never had an accident. He just made it smaller so you can actually move things around in a way that doesn't take years or a new set of infrastructure just days. Asanti wasn't planning on fundraising this year, but calls kept coming in after their pre-seed launch and many of their pre-seed investors including Slauson and company, Harlem Capital and Ripple co-founder Chris Larson doubled down on this new round with new capital coming in from investors like Colab Capital, Kevin Hart's Heartbeat Ventures and Angel Investors from Tesla, Uber, Amazon and Google. Silverton partners led this new seed round and it took eight weeks to close it.

2:02Asanti said, I kept having to figure out a way to make more room on the cap table. I wasn't anticipating us raising that level of capital in that period of time, but really fortunate that we have so many investors and partners who were so excited. When it did emerge from stealth back in July, it became the first nuclear company headquartered at a major port, the port of Long Beach. It has since launched two floating barges and has struck a partnership with the Department of Transportation Maritime Division, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the US Coast Guard. Bluecore Energy is now undergoing review with the NRC and the Coast Guard on its product design, which, if successful, will lead to certification of its floating nuclear power plant. Asanti said, we've been talking to them both since the inception of the company and design, but officially started the formal engagement back in August. The Fresh Capital will fund continued product development, regulatory work, nuclear fuel purchases and hiring.

3:02Asanti anticipates the biggest challenge to be the supply chain, securing hardware to build the right portable electricity infrastructure at a pace that can match consumer demand. He said that Bluecore Energy has seen inbound interest from multiple ports, AI data centers and communities that need clean energy and water. He went on to say that our team comes from SpaceX, Rivian and Toyota, so we are applying similar strategies to be able to secure critical parts. We already have barges and a reactor and are now about to order a nuclear fuel to go to our partner at a national nuclear lab. Asanti finished off by saying it all goes back to the core mission, to democratize access to clean energy. My philosophy is that access to clean energy and also clean water should be a human right. Silicon Valley is known for embracing the ethos of move fast and break things. Poseidon Aerospace is co-founder and CEO David Zaganov just wants to move things fast.

4:08When he was working on logistics at Amazon back in 2024, Zaganov and his Poseidon co-founder, Mark Rtenny, who was at Lockheed Martin at that point, found themselves repeatedly talking about the rise of advanced air mobility startups. And they realized, Zaganov told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview that the focus was almost always on introducing flashy new technologies. He said, philosophically, we want to build the future of aerologistics, not to be a hater, but I think a lot of people who start aerospace companies get nerd-sniped by very cool technology and then want to implement it into market. For us, we want to improve cargo. Poseidon Aerospace secured $11 million in seed funding last year in pursuit of that goal. Now the company has closed a $60 million series A ahead of the first test flight of its uncrewed cargo plane, EGRETE, expected by the end of this year. The funding round was led by early stage VC firm TQ Ventures and saw new investments

5:11from Hanwa Asset Management, G-squared and JALS, existing backers, Starship Ventures, Draper Associates, and DroveRventures also invested. Trudas Agadonov's allergy to getting nerd-sniped by promising it currently unworkable technologies, Poseidon is being built with a ruthless approach to lowering the cost of transporting cargo. The startup is embracing autonomy and remote piloting, but it's not bothering with the vertical takeoff and landing tech that is dead or good among so many aviation startups. There's also no hydrogen or electric power train to be found. EGRETE and its C-plane variant, Heron, are fixed-wing aircraft powered by regular old combustion engines. It's really hard to beat the energy density of fuels of anything carbon-related, second off said. Can I make a really good box with wings to move things for super cheap? If you do that, then abstracting the tech away, we're left with unmanned cargo like planes that are able to operate on a much lower cost curve and have much higher utilization.

6:16As Agadonov said, Poseidon is initially targeting the defense and regional commercial cargo spaces. On the defense side, the startup is designing its aircraft so it can service remote communities and underserved routes where air cargo service is constrained. Poseidon wants its planes to handle locations with degraded or non-existent infrastructures because such capabilities, mechanations, logistics capabilities, harder to disrupt and more resilient to adversary denial. The startup has noted in the past that China is already testing its own cargo drones. Now on the commercial side, Zaginov said Poseidon is not going to sell its planes. He wants Poseidon to operate its own regional air cargo business in order to compete with existing air cargo carriers for business from UPS, FedEx and others. Not requiring pilots for the aircraft also paves the way for Poseidon to operate at a lower cost. The autonomy also makes Poseidon a potentially more flexible and dynamic carrier.

7:20If demand spikes in a particular region, it will be easier for Poseidon to change its routes since it is not planning around a particular pool of pilots who live in one area or another. He also imagines a world where Poseidon's aircraft can break the typical hub and spoke model of regional air cargo and do more point-to-point trips, similar to how low-cost commercial airlines like Breeze or Avello operate. Another benefit of not having a pilot is that it frees up the startup to change fundamental aspects of the design of its aircraft. Zaginov said, get rid of the cockpit, get rid of the life support systems, you get to pull a ton of structured way down, which then means that your ratio of payload to empty weight changes. Your engines can be much lighter, much more efficient. And so it's like a virtuous cycle in the positive direction of just lighter and cheaper. To do all that, Poseidon has expanded into an old Navy hangar in Alameda, California, and it's about to go on a hiring spree as it pushes towards that first flight.

8:23The startup last year developed and flew a quarter-scale version of its vehicle, which it called SeaGulm, but it needed more space to build its full-size 50-foot wingspan aircraft. Poseidon's also benefiting from a regulatory environment that is open to new ideas. The Federal Aviation Administration recently started a pilot program that makes it easier for startups working on electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft to test their tech. Poseidon is not working in that space, but Zaginov said his startups still benefits from the program and that there's a path to commercialization that he didn't think existed five or ten years ago. The fuel for a fully reusable rocket that can unlock truly low-cost access to space is not methane or liquid oxygen. It's cash. And stoke space technologies is tanking up. The company has now completed the initial closing of a $1 billion series e-round, intended to help it reach orbit and prepare a new larger rocket for operations.

9:27CEO Andy Lapza told TechCrunch, this round is really to scale, to lay the infrastructure to scale in production and flight frequency and importantly to fund the development of the second-generation vehicle. The round was led by .72 ventures and Spark Capital and included investment from General Innovation, Gladebrook Capital, U.S. Innovation Technology, Washington Harbor Partners, Lovyn Capital and Y Combinator, among others. Stoke is one of a handful of startups attempting to compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX in the low-cost rocket launch space. SpaceX was built around the Falcon 9, which has a reusable booster stage, and now Musk and company are trying to field a huge fully reusable rocket called Starship. But unlike its rivals RocketLab, Relativity Space or Firefly Aerospace, Lapza's company is aiming straight at that holy grail. A rocket where both the booster stage and the payload carrying second stage come back to Earth so they can be reused cheaply.

10:29It's never been done before. Such ambition and technical features require capital. SpaceX has spent well over $10 billion on Starship over the last decade, and the vehicle still has not yet reached orbit, although that may change on its next flight. Now Stoke has raised $2.3 billion in total. In particular, SpaceX has struggled to identify the right materials and configuration for the components that shield the second stage of the rocket from the extreme heat caused when it is re-entering the atmosphere. Stoke, instead, flows super-cooled liquid hydrogen through its thermal shielding. A unique active cooling solution that Lapza says has been tested exhaustively on the ground, and will be deployed on the first flight. SpaceX said that he expects Stoke's first vehicle, the Nova Pathfinder, to take flight early next year. In a business known for delays, he's confident sharing that target following a series of structural and operational tests on the rocket's first stage at the company's Moses Lake

11:31facility. Next up is test firing each stage of the rocket on the ground to ensure they are ready for flight. The startup has already sold launch contracts on the vehicle, which can carry three metric tons to low-earth orbit that will be Lapza believes the largest debut vehicle of any U.S. rocket maker. Now that said, few rockets get off the ground on time and with total success, and simply getting to orbit, would be an achievement. That's all for now for the latest in tech news, go to techcrunch.com.