You wouldn’t just buy an engine. You want the whole damn car.
That’s the driving philosophy behind Applied Atomics, a startup building not just the SMR but also the complete power plant surrounding it, along with plans to sell energy—not reactors—to power-hungry customers. The company officially emerged from stealth this morning with a $2M batch of funding.
Alpaca Ventures led the pre-seed round. It also included participation from Unruly Capital, Fred Stutzer, Zach Dunn, Jonathan Lund, SLC4 Ventures, and MARS Partners.
Lesson learned: The founding team of Applied Atomics hails from aerospace—including the early days of Falcon 9 development at SpaceX. Falcon 9 transformed the space industry by precipitously bringing down the cost of mass to orbit, and the company did that through vertical integration and a ruthless pace of iteration.
“Crucially, the company owned the full stack of engineering, build, test, and launch which provided control over cost and schedule,” Ben Kellie, SpaceX alum and CEO of Applied Atomics, said in a blog post. “Most important, Falcon 9 actually launched. A lot.”
Kellie believes that he can take a similar tack when it comes to scaling SMR adoption. That means developing the whole power plant, not just the generating piece, and using existing technology to streamline the process.
The deployment mindset: Applied Atomics is developing a Gen III+ light-water, LEU-fueled SMR, which it believes is the most practical approach based on the current state of nuclear power generation.
“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,” Kellie wrote.
All of this is done with the end market in mind. Kellie said that Applied Atomics’ ideal customer is anyone who needs between 100 and 1,000 MWe for their industrial projects.
“This includes advanced talks with hyperscalers, sustainable fuels, large mines, carbon sequestration, LNG plants, chemical producers, and more,” Kellie told Ignition via email. “Working hand-in-hand with off-takers is critical for us from day one since we are vertically integrating the full powerplant stack.”
What’s next? Applied Atomics is planning to complete a preliminary design review for its Powerplant PDR by the end of this summer. Then comes the construction of a non-radiological demo project while the company seeks a site for commercial deployment and works with the NRC on licensing.
Scaling the team is part of that deployment. Kellie told Ignition that the team is four people right now, but he expects it to be more than double that (“double digits”) by the end of the year. And fundraising doesn’t end here, either—Kellie said the company plans to raise a seed round this fall.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
