Funding Friday: Of Stellarators and SPACs

Nuclear is once again a dominant theme this week, with fusion startup Thea Energy landing a $100 million Series B that will help it expand its magnet manufacturing capabilities. While $100 million is nothing to scoff at, it somehow sounds modest alongside some of this year’s other deals, which include a $450 million Series A for Inertia Enterprises and $240 million for Shine Technologies. This week also brought the news that small modular reactor startup Newcleo plans to go public via SPAC later this year, bringing to mind the exuberance of the 2021 SPAC boom, in a deal expected to net a cool $429 million.

Elsewhere, gridtech company Utilidata raised fresh capital after (surprise!) pivoting to the data center market, while a standalone battery storage developer and operator is betting there’s still plenty of money to be made in the increasingly crowded ERCOT market.

Thea Energy Lands $100 Million to Scale Stellarator Fusion

Thea Energy officially joined the growing ranks of fusion companies to surpass $100 million in total funding this week, raising a $100 million Series B round led by the U.S. Innovative Technology Fund to scale its magnet manufacturing operations as it targets a demonstration reactor by 2030. Thea is a part of the Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, which seeks to accelerate efforts for commercial fusion power. In January, the DOE certified Thea’s preconceptual pilot plant design, making it the first of the program’s eight awardees — who will split $46 million in federal funding — to see its reactor architecture validated.

Unlike many top-funded fusion startups, which are building donut-shaped tokamak reactors, Thea Energy is betting on a stellarator design. Traditional stellarators resemble a helical tokamak, which require manufacturing and installing dozens of huge, twisted magnets, but Thea’s approach deviates from the norm. Instead, it relies on hundreds of small, planar magnets arranged in the more familiar donut-shaped configuration, which the company’s artificial intelligence software controls individually. That enables Thea to create the same complex magnetic field within a far simpler and more manufacturable shell.

Thea plans to use the new capital to build a second facility in New Jersey to complement its existing lab and to double its headcount as it seeks a site for its demo reactor later this year. The startup is aiming to bring its subsequent commercial pilot online by 2034, on par with the timeline laid out by fusion industry leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems. According to Gaetano Crupi, USIT founder and billionaire investor Thomas Tull “believes the stellarator is the right architecture for commercial fusion, and Thea Energy is the company that makes it commercially viable.” As Crupi put it in a press release, that’s because “Thea Energy’s breakthroughs shift complexity from precision mechanical fabrication to software-defined controls.”

Newcleo Is the Latest Nuclear Startup Planning a SPAC Merger

Newcleo is the latest small modular reactor startup seeking a quick pathway to the public markets via a SPAC merger, announcing plans to list on the Nasdaq in the second half of the year after merging with a blank-check firm. The deal values the European fuel and reactor developer at $2.4 billion, and is expected to deliver about $429 million in fresh capital. It comes just months after Newcleo raised $88 million in a growth financing round as the company expands into the U.S. market while continuing to fund projects across Europe.

Newcleo stands out in the crowded SMR field through its fuel and cooling strategy. It plans to run its 200-megawatt reactors on recycled fuel made from nuclear waste products like recovered plutonium and depleted uranium, and cool its reactors with liquid lead rather than water. Because liquid lead has such a high boiling point, lead-cooled reactors can operate at atmospheric pressure, reducing the need for the complex, high-pressure systems used in conventional nuclear plants and potentially improving safety along the way.

The company has already raised over $760 million to date, and CEO Stefano Buono told the Wall Street Journal that the pending SPAC could carry it through 2028 or 2029. Even that won’t be enough, however, for Newcleo to reach its target of opening a fuel factory by 2031 and bringing a commercial reactor online the following year. Not to mention that SPACs — a once rare go-to-market strategy — have a checkered history in the SMR industry. After NuScale went public via SPAC in 2022, its flagship project collapsed, taking its stock down with it and underscoring the risks that pre-revenue companies face when their early failures unfold in the public markets. On the other hand, shares of Sam Altman-backed startup Oklo’s have surged since it went public via SPAC in 2024, reaching a market cap over $11 billion, though it also has yet to build a reactor.

Newcleo’s capital push may also be tied to its strategic partnership with Oklo, as it has preliminary plans to invest up to $2 billion to develop advanced nuclear fuel facilities in the U.S. in partnership with the SMR pioneer. Earlier this week, the DOE selected Oklo — and by extension, Newcleo — to enter “advanced negotiations” to receive surplus weapons-grade plutonium for use in reactor fuel.

Utilidata Raises $40 Million for Data Center Power Optimization

What’s that I hear? Another climate tech company has pivoted to the data center market? While Utilidata — an artificial intelligence-powered gridtech company — initially set out to give utilities granular insight into household-level electricity usage and grid data, it’s now raised a $40 million extension round to accelerate its shift into the data center market. As I wrote following last year’s initial $60 million tranche of Series C funding, Utilidata initially set out to get its hardware module inside residential smart meters — which it managed to do at pilot scale — to enable faster fault detection and eventually even automate load management at the household level.

Now, Utilidata is taking this same principle and applying it to the booming data center market, where so many climate tech companies are finding their first customers. The company developed its AI platform in collaboration with Nvidia, installing its modules on server racks to help data centers optimize power allocation across its facility. The company says it measures power consumption a million times per second, such that if usage on one rack is low, it can reroute electricity to parts of the data center that need it. Much like electric grids, data centers also overbuild their capacity to ensure they can handle sudden spikes in demand or hardware failures. Utilidata wants to tap into that headroom by managing power flow in real time.

Utilidata’s first commercial data center deployment is set to go live next month in Montreal in partnership with European AI cloud provider NexGen Cloud, with the startup targeting a 50% increase in the data center’s usable processing power. It also plans to use this latest funding to increase headcount by 25% this year as it builds out operations at its new Ann Arbor headquarters, which opened in February.

Goshe Takes in $40 Million From S2G Investments for ERCOT Battery Buildout

In some later-stage funding news, battery energy storage developer, owner, and operator Goshe Energy Storage just secured up to $40 million in strategic financing from S2G investments. As I wrote last week, S2G recently raised a $1 billion fund aimed at helping growth-stage companies commercialize, though this latest commitment actually comes from a different arm of the firm — its Special Opportunities team. This division focuses on non-dilutive financing, in this case providing Goshe with a HoldCo loan backed by the company’s portfolio of energy storage projects. Rather than lending to a specific project, a HoldCo loan gives Goshe flexible capital that can be used to fund its broader growth.

Founded in 2022, Goshe specializes in acquiring late-stage battery storage projects and getting them over the finish line by securing capital and managing the construction process into commercial operations. Thus far, all of its announced projects are in Texas’ ERCOT electricity market. Alongside this financing announcement, Goshe said that its first project — a 100-megawatt battery storage plant in Bexar County, Texas — is now fully operational after securing $288 million in project financing. The company also expects to bring its second project, a 180-megawatt storage facility, online in the following few months, with two additional ERCOT projects slated to begin construction later this year.

This funding is the latest sign that infrastructure investors have grown comfortable backing battery energy storage projects, with a record 24.3 gigawatts of new battery storage capacity projected to come online in the U.S. this year alone. The wholesale ERCOT market, however, is no longer the guaranteed moneymaker that it was just a few years ago. Between January 2024 and January 2026, ERCOT more than tripled its battery storage capacity, driving battery revenues down as the market has become increasingly crowded. In this landscape, there may be a growing number of stranded projects for Goshe to acquire, though it’ll also have to be increasingly selective.