Valar Atomics Lands $1B to Scale Helium Microreactor
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- Valar Atomics raised $1 billion in Series B funding led by Sequoia to scale its 5-megawatt Ward 250 helium-cooled microreactor toward mass production, though the design still lacks approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
- Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, a vocal Trump supporter who became a lightning rod over widely condemned bigoted remarks against Muslims, led the round and will join Valar's board.
- Valar has emerged as what Mother Jones called "the Trump administration's favorite nuclear startup," with the DOE selecting it for two separate pilot programs and the company becoming the first venture-backed startup to split atoms at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
- In February, Valar loaded Ward 250 components onto a C-17 Globemaster III at California's March Air Reserve Base and flew them to Utah's Hill Air Force Base — the first demonstration that a microreactor could be wholly transported by plane, an airlift the Trump administration touted as "groundbreaking."
- Valar intends to manufacture its own TRISO fuel, a complex form with only a handful of domestic suppliers currently working to ramp up production.
- Valar faces deep-pocketed competition from Kairos Power, which broke ground on its Tennessee plant earlier this year with Google backing, and X-energy, in which Amazon took an equity stake in 2024 and which won a key federal approval in May.
Why it matters: Valar's $1B round is a wager that the Trump administration's regulatory overhaul clears the path to commercializing helium-cooled reactors that sidestep water-cooling limits — but the Ward 250 still needs NRC approval, and well-funded rivals Kairos Power (Google) and X-energy (Amazon) are racing the same finish line, making the Trump-aligned funding round as much a political bet as a technical one.
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