Receptionist

This $470mn nuclear startup is racing a presidential deadline, not the AI boom. Antares has raised $470mn to build nuclear reactors the size of a shipping container for US military bases. Its reactor makes one megawatt, about a thousandth of a conventional plant. The deadline it is racing is not a market opportunity but a presidential order, and it falls in September 2028. July 27, 2026 - 1:30 pm Most of the money pouring into small nuclear reactors is chasing AI data centres. This round is chasing a date. Antares has raised $470mn, co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, with Point72 Ventures, Shine Capital and Industrious Ventures joining. The split is $370mn of equity and $100mn of debt, Bloomberg reported. The company was founded in 2023 and has now raised more than $600mn. It wants reactors on US military installations by 2028. The deadline doing the work. Executive Order 14299 directs the Department of War to have a reactor operating at a domestic military installation by 30 September 2028. That is the clock. Antares has firm contracts, a named site and a fixed date, which is an unusual position for a nuclear company of any size. The | of EU tech The company states the reasoning plainly in its announcement. Many US bases draw power from a commercial grid under strain from rising demand, extreme weather and, as it puts it, adversary targeting. The Air Force picked Antares under its ANPI initiative for a proposed deployment at Joint Base San Antonio. Chief executive Jordan Bramble says more military projects will be announced this year. How small is small. The scale is easy to miss and it is the most interesting number here. Antares reactors produce no more than one megawatt. A conventional nuclear plant makes about one gigawatt. Even among microreactors, which usually top out around 20 megawatts, Antares sits at the very small end. A factory builds these units and ships them whole. They run for years without refuelling, and the company targets six years or more of deployed operation. That is a different product from the reactors being built for the AI boom. Valar Atomics raised $450mn to power data centres. X-energy raised $1.02bn in a Nasdaq listing. In the UK, Nuclear Turbines raised £15mn on Monday to make industrial power cheaper. Antares is selling resilience to soldiers, not cheap electricity to hyperscalers. The milestone, and how to read it. In June, Antares took its Mark-0 reactor critical at Idaho National Laboratory, meaning it sustained a fission reaction. The company calls this the first privately developed non-light-water reactor to reach criticality in the United States in more than four decades. Paradigm's Alana Palmedo went further, calling it the first private advanced reactor criticality in decades. Bloomberg frames it more narrowly. It reports Antares as the first participant in the Energy Department's reactor pilot programme to produce a self-sustaining fission reaction. That is a real first, and a smaller one than the company's wording implies. The test ran on TRISO fuel. It validated reactor physics, reactivity control and instrumentation in a full-scale core, and it produced only a small amount of energy. "On June 4th, we won the race to criticality, and now we've shifted to the race to commercialisation," Bramble said. What has not happened yet. No microreactor is in service anywhere in the United States. Bloomberg notes the technology remains unproven at commercial scale. Antares does not expect a system that generates electricity until next year, when the Mark-1 is due. Criticality and useful power are separate achievements, and the company has one of them. Bramble frames the raise as matching public money rather than replacing it, describing the $470mn as investing "one-to-one with the taxpayer" to reach commercial scale. The bottleneck nobody mentions. Fuel is the constraint that has strangled advanced nuclear for years, and Antares moved on it in May. It signed a long-term enrichment agreement with Urenco for High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, which Urenco called the world's first multi-year contract for HALEU supply. Advanced reactors need HALEU. Western supply of it has been thin, and Russia was for years the most reliable commercial source. Locking in enrichment is arguably a harder problem than locking in capital, and it attracts a fraction of the attention. Why this one is worth watching. Britain and Europe are running the same experiment on a different footing. A Polish billionaire's £35bn plan for 14 mini reactors targets first power in 2034, six years after Antares plans to be switched on at a US airbase. The gap is not technical so much as procedural. American defence procurement has produced a hard deadline, a named customer and a signed contract, which is a faster mechanism than a competitive energy market. Whether the reactor works on time is a separate question. Antares has made a fission reaction happen in a laboratory in Idaho and has not yet made a watt of useful electricity anywhere.

Crypto VC giant Paradigm raises $1.2B, plans to bet beyond crypto. VC firm Paradigm has announced a $1.2 billion in funding to support "technical frontier" startups, expanding its focus beyond crypto. Table of contents. * Paradigm broadens investment strategy beyond crypto * VC firm confirms long term commitment to crypto * AI and crypto are converging Key highlights: * Paradigm is expanding its focus beyond crypto with a $1.2 billion funding * The investment aims to help startups focusing on AI, robotics, and other new technologies * The VC firm has reiterated its commitment to crypto and blockchain Paradigm, a leading crypto-focused venture capital firm, is now expanding beyond digital assets. The platform has reportedly raised a staggering $1.2 billion fund to invest in emerging technologies. Even though the company's core vision is rooted in crypto, it eyes backing startups in other areas, including artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and more. The latest development underscores Paradigm's broader vision of diversifying its investment strategy. While maintaining a strong commitment to the crypto ecosystem, the platform envisions supporting the next generation of startups that drive innovation across other sectors. Paradigm broadens investment strategy beyond crypto. The latest reports reveal that venture capital giant Paradigm has announced a fresh $1.2 billion in funding to back "technical frontier" startups. This marks the platform's third venture fund and fourth fund overall. On Wednesday, Paradigm founder Matt Huang revealed this investment, which expands beyond the firm's traditional crypto focus. The company now intends to widen its approach beyond its crypto roots by investing in other major innovative sectors like AI, robotics, etc. The company wrote, "Our approach is to stay close to the metal-researching, building, and investing alongside founders, first in crypto, and now across AI, robotics, and other frontiers." Building on this statement, Paradigm's managing partner, Alana Palmedo noted, "$1.2B to invest in steep exponentials. 8 years ago we were backed by people who believed in the crypto frontier. Now we're doubling down as frontiers are colliding across AI, crypto, space, deep tech, energy. Grateful to our partners." VC firm confirms long term commitment to crypto. Paradigm's new funding is mainly focusing on sectors outside crypto. However, the firm has reiterated its commitment to the digital asset sector. Paradigm stated that it would continue supporting blockchain infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), and other crypto-based projects. The platform also unveiled its existing crypto portfolio, which includes DEX Hyperliquid, prediction market platform Kalshi, and Stripe-backed stablecoin firm Tempo. In addition, the VC firm is also planning to strengthen its investments in blockchain-based research and developer tools. Some of these tools include Ethereum's Foundry and Reth, AI agent project Centaur, and OpenAI's EVMbench. As noted by Palmedo, the current expansion beyond crypto is mainly due to the rapid pace of innovation in other technologies. She stated, "There's so much else happening right now that's pretty hard to ignore." AI and crypto are converging. It is worth noting that Paradigm's latest move comes at a time when AI and crypto are increasingly converging. The lines between these two spaces are now blurring. This is because more crypto companies have started supporting and investing in AI-related projects. Crypto platforms are building infrastructure to allow AI companies to make payments, manage digital wallets, and do digital financing. For example, platforms like Coinbase and Stripe have already launched tools to support these financial activities involving AI projects. Paradigm stated, "This era favors those open-minded enough to throw out existing playbooks and recompute new views of reality frequently. It's a mindset we share with the founders we back." Paradigm's investment also reflects a broader shift in the venture capital space. As AI has grown significantly this year, many investors are rethinking their approach. They are looking beyond traditional blockchain projects. Thus, the VC firm's latest move is part of this larger trend.

Report: Paradigm raises $1.2 billion as AI funding outpaces crypto deals in 2026. Paradigm has closed a $1.2 billion fund built to chase artificial intelligence and robotics deals outside its crypto roots. Key takeaways. * Paradigm closed a $1.2 billion fund on Wednesday targeting AI and robotics. * Bloomberg's Rebecca Torrence reported the fund marks Paradigm's third venture vehicle. * Paradigm already backed Zipline and True Anomaly through the new frontier fund. Bloomberg's Rebecca Torrence reported the news on July 8, 2026, describing the vehicle as the venture firm's third fund. Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam founded Paradigm in 2018. Huang previously worked as a partner at Sequoia Capital. Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase. Together they built one of the more technically involved firms in crypto investing, often working directly with founders on protocol design alongside writing checks. The new fund lands at a moment when capital is moving in two different directions. AI startups have pulled in the bulk of global venture dollars over the past year. Crypto deal counts have dropped sharply over the same stretch, with money concentrating in fewer, larger rounds. Paradigm manages roughly $12.7 billion across its funds. Its 2021 vehicle raised $2.5 billion, the largest crypto-focused fund at the time. A 2024 fund brought in $850 million for early-stage blockchain projects. Fund follows years of AI signals. Huang has talked about AI publicly since at least 2023, when Paradigm softened crypto-specific language on its website. He said then that the firm remained committed to crypto but found AI developments too interesting to ignore. Paradigm backed Nous Research, a decentralized AI infrastructure company, in a $50 million round in 2024 or 2025. In February 2026, the firm partnered with OpenAI to launch EVMbench, a benchmark that tests AI agents on finding and patching smart contract vulnerabilities. That February timing lines up with an earlier Wall Street Journal report that Paradigm was seeking up to $1.5 billion for a fund built around frontier technology. The $1.2 billion close lands close to that target. New fund already backs two companies. The Block reported that Paradigm has already deployed capital from the new vehicle into Zipline, a drone delivery company, through a Series H round in March 2026. The firm also joined a Series D round for True Anomaly, a space defense startup, in April 2026. Both investments sit outside crypto entirely. Zipline moves physical goods with autonomous aircraft. True Anomaly builds systems for tracking and defending orbital assets. Crypto deals continue alongside the pivot. Paradigm has not stepped away from crypto. The firm co-led a $175 million round in Morpho, a decentralized lending protocol, in June 2026. It led a seed round for M1X Global, a company building infrastructure for tokenized US Treasuries, in July 2026. The firm also holds positions in Kalshi and other prediction market and payments companies. What this means. Paradigm is using its existing technical team to evaluate AI and robotics deals rather than building a separate group for the work. That choice keeps the firm's crypto expertise in the room for adjacent bets, including AI-driven security tools and autonomous payment systems. For crypto investors watching capital flows, the move signals that even well-capitalized, crypto-native firms see limited room to deploy larger funds inside crypto alone right now. Paradigm has not issued a detailed public statement with limited partner names or deployment targets. Crypto Fear and greed index. Extreme Fear Yesterday Fear Last Week Extreme Fear Last Month Extreme Fear How do you feel about the market today?