US-based Nuclearn, an AI platform designed specifically for nuclear operations, has raised $10.5m in Series A funding to accelerate product development and market expansion. The round was led by Blue Bear Capital, with participation from SJF Ventures and follow-on investments from existing investors AZ-VC and Nucleation Capital.
The new funding will be used to advance development of Nuclearn’s domain-specific AI solutions, expanding features that support operations, engineering, and regulatory compliance. Nuclearn’s platform, which is deployed in more than 65 reactors globally, combines advanced AI with deep nuclear domain knowledge to automate complex workflows that typically require weeks of specialised personnel effort.
Nuclearn was started by Bradley Fox and Jerrold Vincent who were working at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station near Phoenix. They had been experimenting with ways to streamline various repetitive tasks first from a data science perspective, then with more advanced AI models.
The technology, developed by founders with over 30 years of combined nuclear operations experience and trained on millions of specialised nuclear industry documents and diagrams, understands not only what nuclear professionals need, but also the regulatory and safety context behind every decision.
“AI is driving unprecedented innovation in nuclear, but there’s a critical gap everyone’s missing: operational expertise,” said Fox, CEO and Co-Founder of Nuclearn. “You can’t just flip the switch on a nuclear plant – they require decades of domain knowledge to run safely and efficiently. We’re nuclear professionals building AI that understands nuclear operational needs from day one. This Series A lets us scale that expertise to every plant as the industry grows to meet unprecedented energy demand.”
Jerrold Vincent, CFO and Co-Founder of Nuclearn noted: “We’re solving the fundamental challenge of applying AI in highly regulated, safety-critical environments. Our platform doesn’t just process nuclear terminology – it understands the operational context, regulatory implications, and safety considerations behind every decision.”
The platform operates within secure environments while helping to automate critical processes including condition report analysis, outage planning, and regulatory documentation – all tasks that typically require weeks of specialised expertise. Nuclearn’s secure, flexible deployment options – on-premise, hosted, or government cloud – enable nuclear teams to quickly integrate AI reducing manual work and freeing up experts to focus on high-value decisions.
As one in four nuclear workers is set to retire in the coming years, Nuclearn provides nuclear plants with much-needed capabilities to avoid critical knowledge loss and uphold the industry’s safety-first standard – all at a time when reactors are extending their licences further into the future,” said Joey Barrick, principal at SJF Ventures and former nuclear project lead.
“We invested in Nuclearn because the founders have lived in the mission-critical world of nuclear operations and have built a deeply specialised AI solution that dozens of large-scale operations already trust,” said Ernst Sack, Partner at Blue Bear Capital. “Their platform isn’t just promoting AI – it’s operational, secure, and already delivering value at scale in an extremely risk-averse and trust-dependent industry. This is exactly the kind of purposeful, intelligent infrastructure we need to accelerate safe, sustainable, reliable, and affordable energy at scale.”
