Bret Kugelmass

Bret Kugelmass is the founder and CEO of Last Energy, an Austin-based company building factory-made 20-megawatt nuclear power plants designed to be shipped, assembled, and switched on like industrial equipment rather than built on-site like cathedrals. A Stanford-trained roboticist who once helped build a lunar rover control device at NASA, he sold a drone startup, then interviewed more than 800 nuclear experts on his Titans of Nuclear podcast before concluding that the technology was never the problem - the cost of slow, custom construction was. Last Energy has raised about $164 million, closing an oversubscribed $100 million Series C in December 2025, and is racing to plug a pilot reactor into the Texas A&M-RELLIS grid by mid-2026.