There is a quiet kind of power in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Not the loud, grid-strained kind. The kind you can hold in your hand, ship by road, and let run for decades. NuCube Energy just raised $13M to prove that nuclear does not have to be massive to matter. Sometimes the future fits in a DeccaCell.
Congratulations to Cristian Rabiti, Ph.D., MBA, CEO and Co-Founder, and Bill Gross, Co-Founder and Founder and CEO of Idealab Studio. Arizona Nuclear Ventures led the round, joined by Emission Reduction Corporation, Rob Walton, and Jordan Rose Walton. Smart capital backing serious atoms. That combination tends to glow.
NuCube Energy was founded in 2023 inside Idealab Studio with a clear thesis. Industrial heat and data demand are climbing. Grids are tired. Natural gas is comfortable but carbon is not. So NuCube Energy built a solid-state fission microreactor, NuCube DeccaCell, designed to deliver up to 15 MW with a 7–30 year core life. High temperature output above 1,000°C and up to 1,100°C. Enough heat to make industrial processes sweat and enough power to keep data centers humming without asking the grid for permission.
This is not theoretical ambition. The architecture uses TRISO fuel, heat pipes, a patented fuel assembly, and stainless steel containment. Passive safety. Fewer moving parts. “Walk away safe” is not marketing poetry; it is design intent. When the emergency planning zone can be limited to the building itself, that changes conversations in boardrooms and communities.
Partnerships matter in nuclear. NuCube Energy secured a DOE GAIN voucher on 12/19/2024 to collaborate with Idaho National Laboratory on heat exchanger design. Halliburton Labs brought ecosystem support on Dec 18, 2024. Shell GameChanger added strategic backing and a grant to accelerate development on June 15, 2025. An MOU with Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Orangeville, Utah on June 10, 2025 opens the path for a test microreactor. Then Energy Vault stepped in with a strategic partnership on Jan 15, 2025 to integrate the NuSun platform with VaultOS and B-VAULT for large energy users, especially data centers. Hardware meets orchestration. Baseload meets storage.
NuCube Energy and Energy Vault point to a U.S. data center market that could consume 500 TWh in 2028, roughly 60 GW of generation. When compute scales, electrons must follow. The question is not whether demand is coming. It is who shows up with dependable supply.
The team reads like a reactor core of experience. Mitchell Meyer, Ph.D., Director of Nuclear Fuels and Materials. Lorin Young, P.E., Program Director. Andrea Alfonsi, Ph.D., Core Design Methods Manager. Kais Kawar, Senior Mechanical Design Engineer. Veterans of Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, Idaho National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Jacobs Engineering, X-energy. People who have already lived inside the equations.
NuCube Energy is betting that smaller, modular, transportable nuclear can compete directly with natural gas for high temperature industrial heat while decoupling facilities from strained grids for decades at a time. In a world obsessed with scale, they chose precision. In an era chasing speed, they chose endurance.
