Our Investment in Aalo

Extra-modular nuclear reactors for data centers

The rise in data centers comes with an obvious surge in power demand. Massive clusters of GPUs now require gigawatts of new electricity, and the growth curve is only accelerating. Global electricity demand is set to double by 2050. But the grid was not built for this pace. Interconnection queues stretch for years, renewable projects wait for transmission upgrades, and reliability expectations for critical computing approach 100% uptime.

Where will the energy-hungry AI era find round-the-clock, carbon-free power? Nuclear delivers true clean baseload electricity, power that’s available every hour of every day, independent of weather or geography. To meet the unprecedented demands of hyperscale computing, Aalo is building nuclear plants purpose-built for the data-center economy.

After following the team’s progress for a while, we’re thrilled to share that MCJ has joined Aalo’s $100 million Series B, led by Valor Equity Partners.

What is Aalo?

Aalo is building factory-manufactured 50-megawatt nuclear plants, designed as pods of five 10-megawatt reactors. These “XMRs” (extra-modular reactors) are inspired by the MARVEL test reactor at Idaho National Lab, where Co-founder and CTO Yasir Arafat was chief designer.

The Aalo Pod

Matt Loszak, the company’s CEO and Co-founder, explains that in conventional nuclear, “the reactor is not the product, the plant is the product.” Aalo’s approach reimagines the whole nuclear facility—reactors, turbine, containment, and balance-of-plant—as a single modular product built off-site. This factory model solves the cost overruns and decade-long timelines that have historically hampered nuclear development. The plants ship pad-ready, plug-and-play, slashing siting and interconnection timelines for data-center customers.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

In just a short time, Aalo’s team has proven its ability to execute at a pace rarely seen in advanced nuclear.

Matt Loszak is a serial entrepreneur with a background in engineering and physics, and more than a decade in the software startup world. Before founding Aalo, Matt co-founded a B2B SaaS platform that scaled to 150 employees, raised over $50M in funding, and exited earlier this year.

Yasir Arafat, Aalo’s CTO and Co-founder, is a recognized leader in the nuclear industry. Yasir founded Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactor program and later led the Department of Energy’s MARVEL project, achieving the first DOE reactor authorization in just 30 months with his core team. At Aalo, he brings unmatched experience in pioneering advanced reactor technologies and driving them from concept to regulatory approval.

A notable senior leader is Jon Guidroz, who serves as Aalo’s SVP. Jon previously served as Director of Energy at Microsoft, Google, and AWS, where he authored the original six-pager that led Jeff Bezos to launch Amazon’s energy vertical. He brings decades of experience at the intersection of technology, energy, and hyperscale data centers to Aalo’s mission of delivering abundant, low-cost clean power.

Key Developments

Not only is Aalo’s founding roster stacked with the skills and expertise needed to tackle energy-hungry data centers, but the company has created a strong competitive position in the advanced nuclear space, and has executed tremendously well in a short period of time.

Aalo’s modular-based approach is optimized for data center development patterns, as the company is targeting 52-week deployment versus industry norms of 10-15 years. While the timeline remains unproven at commercial scale, the company has achieved a vertically integrated manufacturing platform with an operational factory in Austin.

The regulatory environment for nuclear energy has dramatically improved under the administration's May 2025 executive orders mandating 18-month NRC review timelines, designating AI data centers as 'critical defense facilities,' and setting a 400 GW nuclear target by 2050. The relaunch of the DOE's $900M SMR program and new executive orders enabling commercial reactors on federal land directly benefit Aalo's data center partnerships. The U.S. Department of Energy also selected Aalo as one of 11 companies in the President’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, aiming to achieve criticality of at least three test reactors by July 4, 2026. And finally, the company recently celebrated its Aalo-X groundbreaking in the desert beside INL, just two years after its founding in 2023.

For all of these reasons, MCJ is proud to back the team at Aalo as they continue to see success and reach milestones at record speed.

Additional Resources:

• Redesigning Nuclear Reactors for Mass Manufacturing with Aalo

• The Most Important Nuclear Reactor (You’ve Never Heard of) by Matt Lozak

• Aalo Atomics raises $100M to build a microreactor and data center together

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