About
Bret Kugelmass founded Last Energy in 2019 as the commercial spinoff of his Energy Impact Center, a Washington DC nuclear-policy nonprofit he started in 2017 after selling his prior aerial drone startup Airphrame. Last Energy ships factory-built micro-modular pressurized water reactors, the PWR-20 and the smaller PWR-5 pilot, betting that nuclear's cost problem is a manufacturing problem solvable by repeating units rather than custom-engineering each plant. He earned a BS in Mathematics from Stony Brook and an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, where he ran an electric-car R&D lab for Panasonic, and earlier worked on lunar rover control systems at NASA. Last Energy raised $100 million in Series C in December 2025 led by the Astera Institute, has signed agreements at Texas A&M-RELLIS, and advises NATO on microreactors. Kugelmass also hosts the Titans of Nuclear podcast, the most thorough oral history of the modern nuclear industry.
Previous roles
- Founder and Managing Director, Energy Impact Center
- Founder and CEO, Airphrame
- Mechanical Engineer, Nanosolar
- Engineer, NASA
Notable work
- Host, Titans of Nuclear podcast
- Energy Impact Center policy research
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