As the AI boom drives demand for energy-hungry data centers, interest in nuclear power is growing—and with it, demand for the uranium that fuels reactors. But while there are large automated markets for most commodities, that’s not the case with uranium, which still requires traders to call brokers for prices, sign emailed contracts and work with storage facilities to transfer ownership. New York-based startup Uranium Digital wants to modernize that system by bringing uranium trading on-chain.
The company announced Thursday that it had raised $16.5 million in a Series A round that closed last month. The funding will help expand its electronic trading platform, which lets institutions buy and sell uranium while blockchain tracks ownership of the material held at a storage facility.
The round was led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from existing investors Portal Ventures and Christian Angermayer’s Apeiron Investment Group. The financing follows a $6.1 million seed round in 2025, backed by Framework Ventures. Uranium Digital declined to disclose its valuation following the latest funding round.
“The whole point of Uranium Digital is to build out the technical infrastructure to allow the trading [of] nuclear fuels, analogous to how the traditional financial world trades gold, oil, gas, etc.,” Uranium Digital CEO and cofounder Alex Dymala-Dolesky told Fortune.
There certainly appears to be growing demand for nuclear energy and the uranium that powers it. Last month, Amazon announced plans with reactor developer X-energy and electric utility company AEP to explore building 12 small modular reactors in Indiana to supply electricity to its data centers and the regional grid. Meta, meanwhile, struck a deal in January to help reactor developer Oklo build up to 1.2 gigawatts of nuclear capacity in Ohio, with initial power expected as early as 2030. And in August 2025, Google announced a similar partnership with Kairos Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring a 50-megawatt nuclear plant online by 2030.
But those reactors will need uranium—a fuel that remains cumbersome to buy and sell because of the market’s antiquated trading system, according to Dymala-Dolesky.
An untapped market
Dymala-Dolesky came up with the idea for Uranium Digital while trading commodities at a New York hedge fund. With an economics degree and a stint at Canadian investment bank Canaccord, he had grown accustomed to buying and selling metals like copper and silver on a screen. He wanted to trade uranium the same way, but found no comparable option.
By 2024, he decided to quit his job to build the trading platform. He recruited Jack Rindner, a former Goldman Sachs senior analyst in corporate treasury, to be his cofounder, and the two launched Uranium Digital that same year. The company now has 11 employees across Canada, New York and Hong Kong.
Yuan Han Li, a partner at Blockchain Capital, was already an investor in uranium miners when he heard about Uranium Digital over coffee with a friend who worked at Portal Ventures, the startup’s lead pre-seed investor. She introduced him to Dymala-Dolesky.
When Li brought the company to his colleagues, their first reaction was surprise.
“Everyone was honestly pretty perplexed because people just didn’t realize how antiquated the uranium market really is,” he said.
As they dug deeper, they saw a business that could serve not just investors seeking exposure to uranium prices, but miners that wanted to lock in sale prices and utilities that needed to secure fuel.