Kofi Asante has closed an oversubscribed $10 million pre-seed round for Bluecore Energy, making him the first Black founder of a nuclear energy company in the United States.
What Bluecore is building is unusual on its own terms. The company, headquartered at the Port of Long Beach in California, is developing small modular water-cooled reactors designed to run aboard floating energy barges rather than fixed sites on land, delivering zero-emission power directly to ports, critical infrastructure, and cargo ships. The initial system is sized to power the equivalent of roughly 15,000 homes, and can scale to carry a major port.
Asante is a former Uber executive who left his job in January to build it. The round was led by Slauson & Co., the Los Angeles firm built around economic inclusion, with participation from Harlem Capital, Precursor Ventures, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, and Kevin Hart's HartBeat Ventures, among others. That list matters: several of the country's most prominent Black-led funds put weight behind a Black founder in a sector where capital requirements are brutal and the founder pool has almost no one who looks like him.
“Nuclear is one of the most capital-intensive rooms in the economy. He walked in and raised the round anyway.”
Energy is infrastructure, and infrastructure is ownership at its most durable. A $10 million pre-seed does not build a reactor, but it buys a seat at a table Black founders have rarely been anywhere near.
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