Radiant Nuclear

Founded in twenty twenty-four by SpaceX veteran Scott Morton, Revel makes testing and control software for companies building rockets, supersonic aircraft, nuclear reactors, and other complex machines.

In less than two years, it's raised a hundred and eighty million dollars, won customers like Impulse Space and Radiant Nuclear, and was reportedly valued at just over one billion dollars.

In today's episode, Scott and I discuss the hardware renaissance, why industrial software got stuck in the nineteen eighties, what he learned from Elon Musk, and why Revel decided to create its own programming language.

I'm Mario, and this is The Generalist.

And they're like, they like rag on most people.

And if, you know, this person who built Radiant Nuclear or Solugen or Miros or, you know, was, was like, in charge of standing up the Starlink manufacturing line at SpaceX or something like that.

If they're like, hey, you need to talk to this person and they've got a cat litter business.

And I know that sounds weird, but you need to talk to this person.

The US Army just yesterday selecting five companies to build these mini reactors at Army bases across the country, including our next guest's company.

Tory Sivanandan is the president and COO of Radiant Nuclear.

This is an interesting deal because you went through a competitive bidding process, which implies that there are a lot of competitors out there who are trying to do this kind of thing.

You were one of the companies selected to provide these small modular nuclear type facilities for an Army base in particular.

Nine, was it nine, uh, said they were gonna go for it.

Radian didn't.

And, and at that point I said Radian is the clear market leader.

So reaching criticality is not-- I mean, I've never done it.

[chuckles] So a bit off to say it's not that difficult.

We've been doing this for a long time, right? It's impressive for those teams that they've managed to do that in that tight timeframe, and so I don't, don't wanna take anything away from that.

Uh, it's not...

If I was Radian, I wouldn't be going, "Are we gonna struggle to reach criticality?" It's like, no, you've got an excellent team of nuclear engineers.