Stefano Buono Is Betting on America Again

Stefano Buono has already taken one European nuclear company to Nasdaq, built it into a multibillion-dollar business and sold it to one of the world's largest pharmaceutical groups.

Now the Italian physicist and entrepreneur is trying to do something similar again — this time not with nuclear medicine, but with advanced reactors and recycled nuclear fuel.

Buono is the co-founder and CEO of newcleo, the European nuclear technology company that began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker NWCL on September 22 after completing a transaction that raised approximately $247 million.

For Buono, the listing is more than a financing event. It is part of a broader strategy to pair European nuclear engineering with American capital, regulation and commercial opportunities.

From CERN to entrepreneurship

Buono trained as a physicist at the University of Turin before spending around a decade working at CERN and CRS4.

There, he worked with Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia on accelerator-driven systems and nuclear-waste transmutation — technologies focused on using nuclear physics to manage radioactive materials and produce energy.

That scientific background eventually led him away from pure research and toward entrepreneurship.

In 2002, Buono founded Advanced Accelerator Applications, a nuclear-medicine company focused on molecular imaging and radiopharmaceutical treatments.

His first Nasdaq journey ended in a $3.9 billion exit

Advanced Accelerator Applications listed on Nasdaq in 2015 under the ticker AAAP.

Three years later, Novartis completed its acquisition of the company for $3.9 billion.

That experience matters because Buono is not approaching U.S. public markets for the first time. He has already managed a European science-driven business through a Nasdaq listing and subsequent strategic sale.

newcleo's transaction materials have highlighted that track record as part of the company's case to investors.

Why build another nuclear company?

Buono co-founded newcleo in 2021 with the aim of developing lead-cooled fast reactors and facilities capable of producing fuel from recycled nuclear materials.

The company is targeting one of nuclear energy's most difficult challenges: generating power while making greater use of material that would otherwise remain part of the long-term nuclear-waste problem.

newcleo says its approach is designed to reduce dependence on newly mined uranium while supporting a more closed nuclear fuel cycle.

Since its founding, the company has grown to more than 900 employees across Europe and the United States and built a network of more than 100 industrial partnerships.

America was not always part of the plan

One of the more interesting parts of Buono's U.S. strategy is that Nasdaq only became realistic after newcleo began developing a genuine American operating presence.

In an interview filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year, Buono said Nasdaq had always been attractive but that the company previously lacked enough activity in the United States to justify the move.

That changed as newcleo began working with the U.S. government, hiring locally and pursuing regulatory and commercial opportunities in the country.

“The Nasdaq has always been the target, but I never considered the idea mature because we didn't have any activity in the US.”

Buono said the development of actual U.S. operations made the public-market strategy credible.

Why he chose Nasdaq again

Buono has been direct about why he prefers U.S. capital markets for an innovation-heavy company.

He described Nasdaq as the most liquid market for innovation and contrasted that with what he sees as thinner European public-market liquidity for technically complex growth companies.

That argument is particularly relevant for newcleo because advanced nuclear development requires enormous amounts of capital long before commercial plants begin generating meaningful revenue.

The company's latest transaction delivered about $247 million in gross proceeds, while newcleo says it has now raised more than $1 billion in total.

The U.S. could become more than a financing market

newcleo's American ambitions now extend beyond Nasdaq.

The company is working on U.S. regulatory and licensing activity and has been evaluating opportunities to deploy both reactors and nuclear-fuel manufacturing capacity in the country.

Buono has said the faster-moving U.S. policy and regulatory environment could even result in newcleo's first commercial reactor being built in America rather than Europe.

That remains an ambition rather than a completed project, but it shows how far the company's American strategy has evolved.

Still a European company

Despite the Nasdaq listing and U.S. expansion, newcleo continues to position itself as a European industrial and engineering company.

Its research, engineering and manufacturing activities remain heavily concentrated in Europe, and the company has said it intends to maintain its European operating core.

Buono's strategy is therefore not simply to move newcleo to America.

It is to combine European science and industrial capability with American capital, policy support and market opportunity.

What European founders can learn from Buono

Buono's career offers a useful counterpoint to the idea that European founders must choose between Europe and America.

His first major company was built from European scientific expertise but tapped U.S. public markets before ultimately being acquired by Novartis.

With newcleo, he is again using Nasdaq while keeping a large part of the company's technology, workforce and industrial base in Europe.

The recurring theme is not relocation. It is access.

For founders building highly capital-intensive businesses, America can provide investors, customers, regulators and commercial pathways that complement rather than replace a European base.

Buono has already used that model once. newcleo is his attempt to prove that it can work again on a much larger industrial challenge.