Alpaca VC

Most nuclear startups spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars designing a reactor from scratch. Applied Atomics just leapt over its peers. Congratulations to Ben Kellie and the entire Applied Atomics team on securing an exclusive land-based license for BWXT's mPower small modular reactor technology. Alpaca VC is proud to be on the journey with you. mPower comes with a decade of engineering work and hundreds of millions of dollars of prior R&D already behind it. By licensing a proven design instead of building one from zero, Applied Atomics leapfrogs years of development timeline that most companies their size and stage simply can't shortcut, no matter how much capital they raise. The reactor is designed to deliver 195 MW of electricity per unit, manufactured in a factory and shipped like conventional equipment. With domestic power demand set to grow at its fastest rate in a generation, this kind of speed matters. We believe this is what deployment-first execution looks like. Get the full rundown ⤵️ https://lnkd.in/ejrPCRtf

Anyone who actually reads is craving the messy human voice. Fight me. I am cringing at the last nine months of posting, quite honestly. “the insight that broke me” “this is genuinely interesting” “the uncomfortable truth?” “this realization changed everything.” Staccato AI-edited click bait that means nothing and give posts a particular paint thinner / chemical quality. I am so sick of putting my words into AI and it creating this terrible word soup that, on the one hand, is more coherent than the word vomit I fed it, and is so much easier to edit/publish than to hand craft, but on the other hand, is so laden with familiar tropes and rhetoric that it becomes gross to digest. A very yucky soup, indeed. I have become so disillusioned in the AI cognitive offloading that I have decided to go back to the words from my own pen. Slower, but better.

Dropping our monthly roundup of news from Alpaca VC portfolio companies alongside opportunities for early stage founders and a selection of open jobs from the Herd. Read the latest edition of The Rundown for: 🦙 Herd news from Kashable, Intramotev, Chicory, EV Realty + more 🦙 Founder resources including awards + events 🦙 A handful of new roles open in the portfolio

What happens when your AI model is moving faster than the labs processing your data? If you're EARTH AI, you build your own labs. Highlighted in TechCrunch, Earth AI CEO Roman Teslyuk and his team have been using AI to identify promising critical mineral deposits in parts of Australia where no one thought to look. The models have been working all along. But five-month lab turnaround times were slowing down the feedback loop between drilling and the next decision. Their solution: vertically integrating, bringing sample processing in-house to cut that timeline from five months to five days. This is exactly the kind of high-agency execution we believe can fundamentally shift foundational industries. We believe the critical minerals supply chain is one of the most important infrastructure problems of this decade, and solving it requires teams willing to rebuild the entire stack when the existing one isn't fast enough. We're proud to be on the journey with you, Earth AI. Get the full rundown below. https://lnkd.in/gJHeBVKr

Congratulations to Rishi Kumar, Einat Steklov and the entire Kashable team on closing your $60M Series C, led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives. We've been proud to back Kashable since the early days, and watching this team grow is one of the best parts of this job. The thesis is simple and powerful: financial stress is one of the biggest drags on workforce productivity, and most employers don't have a great tool to address it. Kashable gives them one: affordable credit delivered as an employee benefit, with repayment built directly into payroll. We believe it's responsible, practical, and it works. Get the full rundown ⤵️

Have you met the team powering the future of nuclear? Find that in the latest edition of The Rundown by Alpaca VC, plus: 🦙 Herd news from Foyer, Ultimarii Ltd., Pair Eyewear, Chicory 🦙 Founder resources 🦙 Who's hiring across our portfolio ⤵️

The world needs reliable, always-on power. At Alpaca VC, we're proud to be backing the team we believe has what it takes to deliver it. Huge congratulations to Ben Kellie and the entire Applied Atomics team on closing your $8.3M Seed round today. We're proud to be on the journey with you alongside lead investors Transition and Morpheus. Applied Atomics is building 100MW to 1GW nuclear plants co-located with large infrastructure campuses, owning and operating them under long-term power purchase agreements. Full-stack. Integrated from day one across design, supply chain, and operations. As our General Partner Aubrie Pagano put it: Applied Atomics is approaching this as an integrated delivery problem. Taking a page from SpaceX, they've built day-zero alignment across design, supply chain, and operations, and that's what gives this model a real path to deployment where it's so sorely needed. The team brings $1B in heavy infrastructure development across aerospace and nuclear fleet operations, and they're already advancing their SimBox digital twin platform with real supply chain components. Data centers don't get to take a day off. Neither can the power that runs them. This is exactly the kind of foundational industry transformation we look for, and we couldn't be more excited to watch this team build. Get the full story: https://lnkd.in/gywkuE4J Aubrie Pagano Ryan Freedman David Goldberg Daniel Fetner Raymond Updyke, CFA, CPA Josh Jagota Lorraine Sanders

Thrilled to announce Applied Atomics has raised $8.3M in an oversubscribed seed round. Transition VC led with Morpheus Ventures coming in alongside Alpaca VC and other existings. I've had a front-row seat as a board member, and I can tell you: Ben Kellie and Paul Keutelian ship faster than almost anyone I've worked with. We all know we need lots of firm power. It's about who gets there fastest. Applied Atomics is approaching this as an integrated delivery problem. Taking a page from SpaceX, AA has built day-zero alignment across design, supply chain, and operations... and that's what gives this model a real path to deployment where it's so sorely needed. The team isn't waiting on unproven technology cycles. They're using established light-water reactor architecture with full-stack control: design, supply chain, construction, and long-term operations. Own and operate. Predictable pricing. Multi-decade service lives. As Ari Helgason from Transition put it: "Affordable nuclear power has never been constrained by physics. It has been constrained by execution." Ben and the team are going to blast through milestones that have stalled other providers for years. So proud to be an early backer and along for this rocket ship of a ride. 🚀 (Pun very much intended — these are two ex-SpaceX red team vets.) Congratulations Ben, Paul, and the entire Applied Atomics team. https://lnkd.in/gi9wCw5e

Claude Code rewired my work schedule. In the best way. Before: 8am-6pm. Emails, calls, end product review. Everything happened during "work hours" because that's when humans were available. Now: Daytime is for human-centric work. Meetings, coordination, relationship building. Fewer hours, more focused. After 8pm, when the baby goes down, the agents come alive. 🦞 I gather all the inputs and outputs from the day — notes, data, half-finished tasks — and run my skills and discrete agent tasks across several terminal shells. One session. 2-3 hours. Uninterrupted orchestration time while the house is quiet. It's a completely different rhythm. Less reactive, more intentional. The humans get me during the day. The machines get me at night. Honestly? It feels like college again. Cramming for a thesis at midnight, tea in hand, multiple windows open, deep in flow state. Except now I'm not writing papers — I'm conducting a symphony of agents. I don't know if this is the future of work or just my weird adaptation to new parenthood + new tools. Probably both?! Anyone else finding their schedule completely restructured around AI workflows?