Bret Kugelmass

</ref> earning a B.S. in mathematics. He would go on to study robotics at Stanford University, finishing with a in mechanical engineering.
Career
Early in his career, Kugelmass worked for NASA where he helped design lunar rover control systems. In 2009, he took a job as a mechanical engineer for Nanosolar, a manufacturer of solar power technology. Later, during his graduate studies at Stanford, he worked as the head of an electric car research and development lab for Panasonic. He founded the aerial drone startup, Airphrame, in June 2012. That company produced a fleet of autonomous, internet-connected aerial drones designed to collect and produce a range of data, including images, orthographic maps, and 3D models. The firm was originally headquartered in Davis, California, but Kugelmass relocated it to the Silicon Valley in 2014. In July of that year, he secured $4.2 million in startup funding for Airphrame In 2017, Kugelmass sold Airphrame to an unnamed company for an undisclosed amount. In 2017, he founded and became the managing director of the Energy Impact Center, a nonprofit organization and research institute with the stated goal of decarbonizing the economy by 2040 using zero-carbon nuclear power. The organization's goals are based on Kugelmass' belief that carbon dioxide must be actively removed from the atmosphere in order to reverse the effects of climate change and that nuclear power is the most efficient method of achieving that objective. He came to these conclusions after conducting over 1,500 interviews
In February 2020, Kugelmass announced a for-profit offshoot of the Energy Impact Center called Last Energy. That entity raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by First Round Capital. primarily in countries that are transitioning from coal to cleaner energy sources. Kugelmass also developed the Energy Impact Center's OPEN100 plan, which calls for a 100-fold increase in nuclear power by 2040. Coinciding with the announcement of Last Energy, Open100 released an open-source blueprint for nuclear power plant construction. According to the plans, construction would take around two years at a cost of $300 million, although regulatory hurdles would exist in practice.<ref name="PM"/>

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