TerraPower advances plans for next-gen nuclear plants, earning Bill Gates’ praise

This cutaway graphic shows the design of the Versatile Test Reactor. (DOE Illustration)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — TerraPower, the nuclear energy venture that’s backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has gotten a boost on two fronts in its campaign to pioneer a new generation of safer, less expensive reactors.

On Monday, the Idaho National Laboratory announced that an industry team including TerraPower has been selected to begin contract negotiations to design and build the Versatile Test Reactor, a federally financed facility that’s meant to test advanced nuclear reactor technologies. The team is led by Bechtel National Inc., with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy among the other industry partners. (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is also on the concept development team.)

“We received excellent proposals from industry, which is indicative of the support to build a fast-spectrum neutron testing facility in the United States,” Mark Peters, director of the Idaho Falls lab, said in a news release. “We are excited about the potential for working with the BNI-led team.”

The plan calls for work on the project to begin in 2021, and for the reactor to be completed by as early as 2026.

Then, on Thursday, the Bellevue-based venture announced that it’s working with GE Hitachi on a reactor architecture that could supplement solar and wind energy systems with always-on electricity.

The system architecture, known as Natrium, would involve building cost-competitive, sodium fast reactors as well as molten-salt energy storage systems. The heat generated by the 345-megawatt reactors could be stored in the molten-salt tanks, and converted into grid electricity to smooth out fluctuations in renewable energy.

TerraPower says the project has attracted the attention of numerous utilities through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. Among the supporters are Energy Northwest, Duke Energy and PacifiCorp, which is a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy.

“Our exceptional technology development capabilities, unmatched financing credibility and achievable funding strategy mean that the Natrium technology will be available in the late 2020s, making it one of the first commercial advanced nuclear technologies,” TerraPower CEO Chris Levesque said in a news release.

Bill Gates co-founded TerraPower in 2006 and serves as its chairman. Turning the Natrium concept into a reality will be “extremely difficult,” Gates said in a statement reported by Reuters, but he insisted that TerraPower team had “the expertise, commercial experience and the resources necessary” to follow through.

TerraPower had been working with Chinese utilities to build a demonstration reactor, but that plan had to be scrapped in 2018 due to changes in U.S.-China policy made by the Trump administration. Now Gates and TerraPower are focusing on the U.S. market: Last year, The Washington Post reported that Gates would be willing to invest $1 billion and raise another billion dollars in private capital if Congress upped its support for nuclear technology development.

Last month, the U.S. Senate passed the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act, but that legislation still has to be approved by the House.

An artist’s rendering shows NuScale Power’s small modular nuclear reactor plant. (NuScale Power Illustration)

TerraPower isn’t the only Pacific Northwest nuclear power venture to report positive news. Oregon-based NuScale Power announced today that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has completed the final phase of review leading to design certification for the company’s small modular nuclear reactor concept.

NuScale said completion of the process means customers can now proceed with plans to develop NuScale power plants with the understanding that the NRC has approved the safety aspects of the reactor design.

“This is a significant milestone not only for NuScale, but also for the entire U.S. nuclear sector and the other advanced nuclear technologies that will follow,” John Hopkins, NuScale’s chairman and CEO, said in a news release.

NuScale says it has signed agreements with prospective customers in the U.S., Canada, Romania, the Czech Republic and Jordan.

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Jay-Z’s VC firm invests in Seattle startup Wyze, which plans smart thermostat and video doorbell

The Wyze Cam Outdoor from Seattle-based Wyze Labs. (Wyze Photo)

Wyze Labs has added an additional $5 million to a Series A-1 financing round, closing out $15 million in new funds to further improve upon its line of smart home products and build new devices.

Additional interest in the round came from Marcy Venture Partners, co-founded by hip-hop star Jay-Z, Larry Marcus and Jay Brown. The firm has made prior investments in such companies as Hipcamp, Hungry, Wheels and Versed.

“We resonate with their innovative and adaptive culture and vision to make smart home accessible to everyone,” Marcus said about Wyze in a news release.

Seattle-based, Wyze, which was founded in 2017, has expanded beyond its initial offering of a low-cost security camera. The company said its plan is to “continue building the smart home for mass adoption by further improving the IoT infrastructure and AI in current product offerings, and by expanding into new product categories.”

Among those new products, Wyze plans to offer a thermostat and a video doorbell.

The new funding is in addition to $10 million reported at the end of May, led by Norwest Venture Partners. Wyze has raised $36 million to date.

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SAP plans to spin out Qualtrics with an IPO, two years after acquiring software company for $8B

(GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

SAP announced Sunday that it will spin out its Qualtrics unit with an IPO, less than two years after acquiring the experience management company for $8 billion.

SAP plans to maintain majority ownership of Qualtrics, which is co-headquartered in Provo, Utah, and Seattle. Qualtrics’ leadership team intends to remain in place, including founder Ryan Smith, who will be the largest individual shareholder.

“SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics has been a great success and has outperformed our expectations with 2019 cloud growth in excess of 40 percent, demonstrating very strong performance in the current setup,” SAP CEO Christian Klein said in a statement. “As Ryan Smith, [SAP President] Zig Serafin and I worked together, we decided that an IPO would provide the greatest opportunity for Qualtrics to grow the Experience Management category, serve its customers, explore its own acquisition strategy, and continue building the best talent.”

The move comes as several companies test the public markets after an initial slowdown due to the global pandemic, and despite the ongoing economic and health crisis. Earlier this month, healthcare company Accolade was the first Seattle-area company to go public in 2020.

SAP’s $8 billion acquisition in 2018 came just four days before Qualtrics was set to go public as a standalone company.

Founded in 2002, Qualtrics is in the customer-experience management business, helping companies measure, understand, and improve the ways customers and employees experience products, services, and their roles inside companies. It competes against Medallia; SurveyMonkey; and marketing research firms such as Aon Hewitt and Towers Watson.

The company first set down roots in Seattle five years ago and has been growing rapidly ever since. It grew so fast in Seattle that in 2017 it designated the office as its co-headquarters.

This past November, Qualtrics leased 275,000 square feet across 13 stories at the new “Qualtrics Tower” in Seattle, with plans to quadruple its workforce to more than 2,000 people in the region in the years ahead. The company was set to open the office this year; we’ve reached out for the latest updates.

Qualtrics Tower is also home to job search engine Indeed, Dropbox and co-working company Spaces.

SAP previously acquired Bellevue, Wash.-based expense management company Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion back in 2014.

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French work collaboration startup iObeya plans Seattle-area headquarters

The iObeya team. (iObeya Photo)

Work collaboration startup iObeya announced plans for a Seattle-area office Thursday that will serve as a dual headquarters with the company’s Massy, France, home base.

Tim McCracken, iObeya’s Americas general manager. (iObeya Photo)

iObeya announced a $17 million funding round led by Red River West to fund the expansion. The iObeya platform provides visual management and collaboration software for large organizations with distributed teams, services that have seen a 400% increase in demand since the outset of the pandemic, according to the company.

The tools are designed for engineering, manufacturing, and research and development teams that use the Lean and Agile methods. iObeya customers include Airbus, Volvo, Philips, Cartier, and others.

The company’s plan is part of a larger rise in workplace communication and collaboration technology in the Seattle region, such as Microsoft Teams, Amazon’s Chime video conferencing service, collaboration work management company Smartsheet, and startups pivoting into the space.

iObeya’s office will be in the Kirkland/Bellevue area and will be led by iObeya’s Americas general manager Tim McCracken and VP of marketing Rick Tywoniak. It will serve as iObeya’s sales and marketing hub for North America.

Although iObeya plans to lease a physical space eventually, the Seattle team will mostly work from home at the outset. iObeya plans to have employees at the office in late 2020 or early 2021, according to McCracken. The remote team in Seattle will start work as soon as possible.

iObeya plans to hire 20 employees this year and 50 over the next few years, primarily in sales and marketing roles. It’s one of more than 100 companies that have set up shop in Seattle to mine the region’s deep tech talent pool, although the work-from-home trend and cutbacks at some companies are raising questions about the future of those outposts.

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