AIBRIEF
The Series C lands a month after the company's Mark 0 demonstration reactor hit criticality — a self sustaining nuclear chain reaction — at Idaho National Laboratory, and Antares was named a finalist in the Pentagon's base deployment program.
Antares raised a $470M Series C on Monday, with $370M in equity led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital and $100M in debt, to put small modular reactors on U.S. Air Force bases. The round, which the company announced today, brings total funding to roughly $604M per TechCrunch's analysis of PitchBook data.
Antares is one of three finalists in the Pentagon's Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program, which will test the company's SMRs at Air Force bases in Colorado and Montana, with a 2028 deployment target. The Mark-0 demonstration reactor hit criticality at Idaho National Laboratory on June 4, a month before the round closed.
The reactors are sized 100 kW to 1 MW, enough to power up to 750 homes, and run on TRISO fuel, uranium encapsulated in carbon and ceramic shells, cooled by helium or molten salts.
The round lands as X-energy completed a $1B IPO in April, with Radiant Energy, Standard Nuclear, and Last Energy also closing nine-figure rounds since December.
The caveats are unchanged: the U.S. SMR supply chain is immature, scaling production is hard, and mass-manufacturing cost benefits typically need a decade to materialize. No SMR startup has reached that stage yet. The 2027 first-power and 2028 base deployment dates remain company targets, not outcomes.