This is Applied Atomics

Co-located fission powerplants to enable the next 1,000 years of advanced industry.

Applied Atomics builds small modular reactor (SMR) powerplants for advanced applications like hyperscalers, e-fuels, desalination, liquified natural gas, and hydrogen production. These technologies enable the carbon-free future that Earth requires to thrive. Our team designs, builds, and operates the full stack of reactor + powerplant which are co-located on our customers’ sites for maximum uptime and flexibility. Our powerplants scale from one to ten modules which allows them to deliver 100 MWe up to 1,000 MWe per deployment.

Today, we are coming out of stealth to announce our oversubscribed $2M pre-seed round led by Aubrie Pagano and the team at Alpaca Ventures, with Unruly Capital and some very close old friends like Fred Stutzer, Zach Dunn, Jonathan Lund, SLC-4 Ventures, and MARS Partners also participating. We were fortunate to have had a highly competitive round and are honored by the belief our partners have shown in our approach.

Unlocking Nuclear Power

As you may have noticed, there is a lot of activity in the nuclear space right now. Even putting aside the massive activity in fusion, fission has been enjoying a resurgence. And that’s for a host of great reasons — nuclear power plants have the smallest footprint and lowest mining impact of any energy source. They are also latitude-agnostic, meaning they work anywhere in the universe without regard to on-the-ground conditions. Finally, they have the best capacity factor of any energy source and it’s not even close. This makes them perfect for enabling the next 1,000 years of advanced industry.

Yet we are still seeing timelines exceed a decade for new efforts. Plants take too long to deploy and often cost too much. Development of novel reactor designs and advanced fuels will undoubtedly play a part in the future, but we need to make an impact now. Already hyperscalers are being told to “bring their own power” while new utility hookups are backlogged 40% and stretching over five-year delays. Applied Atomics exists to solve these problems and meet the demand that exists now.

How We're Different

1) We’re Not Re-Inventing the Wheel

To address the power crunch, we need to move quickly. That’s why we started by surveying the existing supply chain for nuclear and power generation. We then allowed those realities to drive many of our technology choices, rather than starting with a blank piece of paper. The best new technology in the world is no good if there isn’t a supply chain to support its deployment. This country has been building powerplants for almost 150 years, so there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel on the power generation front. Make steam, spin turbines, generate power.

Similarly, we have built nuclear reactors for over 60 years. All of the operating nuclear powerplants in the United States today are light water reactors running on LEU and we have chosen to work with the Gen III+ architecture as well. We’ll be sharing more on this decision and design trade in the future but suffice to say for now that this allows us to bring well-understood architectures to the regulator, as well as opens up existing fuel supply catalogs that don’t rely on nascent supply chains or adversarial nations.

Getting early clarity on our supply chain has allowed us to complete a 30% powerplant design already this year, which identifies our major costs. From this, we modeled the first version of our power generation costs. These show us immediately competitive with the DOE’s cost goals for Advanced Nuclear for first-of-a-kind deployment, and clear line of site to competing with natural gas costs for our Nth-of-a-kind deployments.

2) We Sell Power, not Reactors

The vast majority of nuclear SMR companies develop only the reactor and leave the “balance of plant” to someone else. However, this “balance” actually represents around 80% of the infrastructure, and therefore strongly affects the final power cost. Imagine getting a new car but instead of a new vehicle arriving, a crate shows up in your driveway with an engine inside. Attached to the crate is a note that says:

“Congrats on buying your new car! Now, it’s up to you to build the ‘balance of car’ and get it licensed with the DMV and DOT.”

Even for the few SMR companies that can claim they are developing their plant, in reality these are often outsourced to large engineering design and construction firms. We believe that this adds too much risk to project timelines, adding unnecessary costs and delays as well as increased regulatory risk.

Customers need power, not components. Applied Atomics sells power through industry standard power purchase agreements, or PPAs. This little to no upfront costs for our customers, and long-term recurring revenue for our company. This also makes each project financeable through traditional means, which streamlines our future capital stack.

Our Team

Our leadership team has over 50 years of combined experience deploying launch and landing infrastructure across the New Space industry, including early on in the Falcon 9 program. We saw that F9 didn’t win the launch industry by reinventing the wheel. It utilized a traditional ground-launched liquid rocket configuration, manufactured it with simple, modern processes, and then put a capsule on top. It also used a known fuel (same as the Saturn V first stage) which relieved regulatory burden.

Crucially, the company owned the full stack of engineering, build, test, and launch which provided control over cost and schedule. Most important, Falcon 9 actually launched. A lot. And that revenue and mission data were used to unlock new efficiencies and value chains down the road.

How do we know? Much of our founding team was there, learning those lessons in real-time as engineers in design, launch, operations, and certification. Now, we see an opportunity to apply this unique perspective to the nuclear industry to address the looming power crunch.

Founders

Applied Atomics was co-founded by three seasoned entrepreneurs and leaders:

Ben Kellie (CEO) joined SpaceX in early 2012 as a Responsible Engineer helping to design, build, test, and operate the Vandenberg SLC-4E west coast launch site. He served as Lead Engineer for the inaugural flight. From there he pivoted over to Recovery and helped lead the development of the landing barges from first steel in the shipyard through multiple missions at sea. He then founded “The Launch Company” which developed launch sites for New Space rocket companies and also bootstrapped hardware to orbit. He successfully exited that company to Voyager Space in 2021.

Paul Keutelian (CTO) is an experienced systems engineer and entrepreneur with over 13 years of hands-on experience in high-stakes production hardware development. He was also an early Responsible Engineer on Vandy with ownership over four high-energy compressible, incompressible, and hazardous fluid systems at the plant scale. He then served as a lead control room operator and trainer as well as a point engineer for certification on a multi-billion-dollar launch program where he honed his ability to navigate highly regulated, precision-driven environments with three government customers. Finally, he was also previously the technical co-founder and first COO of Radiant Industries, where he led the development of the world’s first portable 1.2 MWe microreactor.

Mark Lambert (CFO) is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive who has over 17 years of experience in high-growth startups, financial management, regulatory compliance, and venture capital. He was previously the founder and CEO of a B2B SaaS platform specializing in regulatory compliance and financial accounting for highly regulated industries which processed over a billion dollars annually in financial transactions. He is also Chair of the Tech Investment Committee for NuFund Venture Group and worked closely with national venture capital funds on advanced financial modeling, and strategies for accessing and administering highly regulated government funding programs, including the U.S. Treasury's SSBIC program and the SBA's SBIC program.

Investors

We’re thrilled to have Alpaca on board, leading our pre-seed. General Partner Aubrie Pagano is joining our board and had this to say:

"We are betting that Ben and team will do for advanced industries what SpaceX did for space - be the first to bring online vertically integrated, co-located SMR power solutions. They have done first of a kind in the past, and they are a one-in-a-billion team to pull this off."

Stefano Bernardi of Unruly Capital added:

I fear what an alien species would think of us for not having abundant nuclear energy. We believe your team will remedy that!

We also had a strong coterie of former SpaceX friends who see how our unique approach can change the industry. Special shout out to Zach, Lund, David, Dan, and Christian for backing our vision.

We’re Funded & We’re on a Mission

We’re hitting the ground running. We’re already engaging with potential customers, and we’ve hired our Chief Engineer (another long-time SpaceX collaborator who we will announce soon!).

The team is deep in design to deliver our full Powerplant PDR by the end of this summer, ready to pull the trigger on long-lead hardware items with a fully defined supply chain from fuel, to reactor, to powerplant hardware. Together, these achievements will put us far ahead of the pack in understanding our realistic costs and schedule to deliver co-located power to our customers faster than any other team in history.

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