Nuclear fission startups drew roughly $2 billion in venture funding in 2025, and five deals this month illustrate where that capital—and broader tech investment—is flowing.
Bluecore Energy, a Long Beach, California-based company developing compact small modular reactors designed to operate aboard floating barges, raised an oversubscribed $50 million seed round led by Silverton Partners. The round comes two months after the company emerged from stealth with $10 million in pre-seed funding. Investors in the deal include Slauson & Co., Harlem Capital, Black Angel Group and HartBeat Ventures. CEO and founder Kofi Asante said the company aims to deliver zero-emission energy safely and quickly, noting that over 3 billion people live within an hour of water. Bluecore's first target is the Port of Long Beach, with other ports and power-hungry AI data centers identified as potential customers. The company is working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and U.S. Coast Guard on certification.
BRKZ, a Riyadh-based marketplace connecting construction companies with building-material suppliers, secured $31 million in new capital. The financing consists of a $13 million Series B equity round co-led by Wa'ed Ventures, Saudi Aramco's venture arm, and 500 Global, plus an $18 million growth-debt commitment from Stride Ventures under a previously announced facility. The company has now raised more than $83 million. BRKZ says it has accumulated approximately 38 million structured data points powering an AI pricing engine trained on roughly 40,000 requests for quotes, with 84% to 89% of its predicted prices coming within 5% of the eventual transaction price. Another AI agent reads photos of cement delivery notes sent through WhatsApp to verify deliveries, processing roughly three-quarters without human intervention. The raise comes amid a construction boom in Saudi Arabia.
Viabot, a Santa Clara, California-based startup building autonomous robots for outdoor commercial property maintenance, raised a $24 million Series A led by Walden International. The company's machines combine autonomous navigation with attachments for sweeping, debris removal and landscaping, while also conducting security patrols across large campuses. Viabot operates on a robot-as-a-service model, targeting what investors have called "dirty, dull and dangerous" outdoor work that is often filled by a labor shortage. Global venture funding to physical AI companies—spanning robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, drones, industrial automation and sensors—reached $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, nearly four times the $12 billion invested in the second half of 2025.
Robocurve, a three-month-old San Francisco startup, raised a $10 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Notable Capital, Halcyon Futures and Decasonic. The company is incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation and acts as an independent third-party auditor for physical AI, publicly reporting how well frontier AI models control real robots. Robocurve says its own research has found that general-purpose large language models can outperform specialized robotics vision-language-action models on some simple tasks. Rather than developing every benchmark itself, Robocurve funds academic teams and supplies robot hardware to create open-source benchmarks. More than 200 institutions—including researchers from 19 of the world's top 20 universities—have signed up for its program, which offers a combined $500,000 in funding plus free robotic arms.
The broader investment landscape shows physical AI attracting record levels of capital. Robotics startups alone raised more than $21 billion globally in the first half of 2026, eclipsing the nearly $16 billion raised in all of 2025. Cleantech, EV and sustainability-focused startups collectively raised about $15 billion in the first half of 2026, with second-quarter funding reaching its highest quarterly level since 2024. Global proptech startups raised about $6.5 billion through roughly 640 deals in the first half of 2026, on pace to top last year's dollar figures despite a dip in deal count.
