Today, we are excited to announce the first annual Austin Deep Tech 50. Austin has become the hub for some of America's best deep tech founders, so we brought together 8 VC firms with a local presence — @overmatchvc, @valor, @8vc, Banner VC, @BCapitalGroup, @TheAmbitionCap, @ensemblevc, and Trust Ventures — to vote on the 50 startups making the biggest impact. Together they've raised $10B+ in the last 12 months. Full write-up: The full list 🧵👇

Greetings from the American Frontier! 🇺🇸 Introducing the definitive Austin Deep Tech 50. 50 companies. $10B+ raised in the last 12 months. Selected by the leading VC firms in town. And we’re just getting started🚀

If you run the numbers on Cybercab, the potential really is insane. Fare revenue could be bigger than all their car sales combined. Maybe even bigger than Amazon. First, for a city like Austin, how many Cybercabs would it take to cover today's ride-share demand? Around 2,000, to hit consistent 2-minute pickups. Ok, that's given today's demand, but Cybercab could create entirely new consumer behavior. It may end up getting priced MUCH cheaper than uber, has a more consistent & private experience, you could do email or watch Netflix on your way to and from work, etc. So what would happen if people started commuting with it, and using it instead of their car on most trips... Around 50,000 cars would do the trick. How does this compare to the number of cars on the road in Austin today? Austin has 800,000 cars on the road, so it's much less, but it makes sense given the Cybercabs would have higher utilization. So what if we extrapolate the math to EVERY major US city? 15,000,000 Cybercabs. How much revenue would this translate to for Tesla? Both in terms of the sale of the car, but also in terms of the fare revenue? Sale of car: $420 billion, but spread over several years to reach this point. Fare revenue: $736 billion PER YEAR....! To put that into perspective, that is more annual revenue than Amazon, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, or NVIDIA. It's 7x Tesla's current entire-company revenue base. This reminds me of how SpaceX became a telecom business more than a rocket launch business, by revenue. Tesla may become a ride-hailing business more than a car business, by revenue too. And all this before we think about what Optimus could do. Insane. 🤯

Today, pressure vessels are extremely safe. But 100 years ago, steam boilers (not nuclear) used to explode once a day. In 1905, one explosion happened right under a Shoe Factory in Massachusetts, collapsing the building, and starting a fire. 58 workers were killed. As a result, Massachusetts wrote the first boiler law, and in 1915 the engineering societies published a uniform set of codes, so a vessel built in one state could be trusted in another. That document became the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code. Nuclear power arrived four decades later, and nearly those same exact codes could be used. But they had to add a new section: Section III, which governs every reactor pressure vessel in America. Why? Because the old ASME boiler code was just addressing: “Can this steel vessel safely hold hot, high-pressure water or steam?”. For a nuclear plant, engineers had to answer: “Can it keep doing that for decades while being bombarded by neutrons, heated and cooled 1000s of times, exposed to radiation, and serving as part of the barrier that keeps radioactive material contained?” So the N-stamp was born, as a certification that Section III had been satisfied, specially created for nuclear reactor vessels. Reactor vessels have had extremely good safety records, thanks to these early precautions from outside the nuclear industry.

We spent the last few weeks exhibiting and talking to people about the energy ecosystem and Aalo. So after a few thousand conversations, here are our reflections from the deep trenches of the data center, energy, and technology world: 1. Robust power ecosystem. Energy is a highly focal subject among commercial, investor, policy, and professional audiences and there is an enormous volume of resources, attention, and manpower going into the full stack of energy production and consumption. We take this as given but it is a radical shift from recent history. 2. Nuclear is near-unanimously viewed as the future among stakeholder groups. The most common initial remarks we heard about nuclear power are that it is the future and we should build more now, and nuclear shutdowns were a bad move (most people this view is contrarian, when it is (now) mainstream). While there is obviously selection bias here, this is the exact group shaping policy, investments, and commercial agreements, so it is a very credible and important signal. 3. People view nuclear energy as one category. This is wrong: just like anything else, different products are made for different markets. A 1 MW reactor for military bases is not competing with a 50 MW modular system for data centers, which is not competing with a 1 GW, 20-year, state-funded plant development. Just because its energy does not mean product-market fit is not a thing. 4. The #1# question is timeline to commercial generation. No surprise here given statement (1), but it is notable that the first question is not about cost or cleanliness of power. People are power-hungry, now. 5. These were the product advantages people cared the most about: first, our coolant choice (sodium) as making sites much physically smaller by unpressurizing the system, second, our modularization/factory approach as radically shortening build/deployment time, and third, our commercial agreement structure as easing upfront cost. 6. Data center community engagement is a shared priority. I think of concerns in two buckets: one, "spec" concerns like water usage, pollution, and rate impacts, and two, a more fundamental concern about change and artificial intelligence. Some concerns in some cases are legitimate, others are completely unfounded, my net note is there is a lot of change working its way through the system via active discourse and experimentation. 4 rapid-fire: 7. Power demand is additive. It’s not solar or nuclear or nat gas, it’s nuclear + solar + etc. 8. Support for nuclear power is overwhelmingly bipartisan. This derisks commercialization roadmaps. 9. Media is *highly* effective for reaching people. Cool to meet so many Aalo followers in person! 10. Government is rethinking how to prompt private industry. Programs like the RPP were so effective that many of the folks who hold the government checkbooks are starting to think more outside the box. This is good! so those are my thoughts now a CTA is warranted, you should follow @AaloAtomics

the second atomic age is here and america is innovating on reactor designs again. coolant is *the* most important design choice for a reactor liquid sodium (not salt!) is counterintuitively the strongest choice to unlock safe reactor mass production:

BTW, Aalo only spent around $100M total to get to criticality. That includes our full-scale fuel load, full-scale reactor (no sodium), factory and its machinery, all payroll, regulatory fees, etc. Everything. The people who told you nuclear has to be expensive are wrong.

"We moved into the space around two years ago, and it was an empty shell. Now it's much more filled out and we build reactors here! We actually turned the reactor on on July 4th of this year. Now we're ready to.... mass produce this hardware, and try to make a big difference in the world."

“I don’t think we could have gone critical without Revel. It would have taken months to get programmed and to troubleshoot on any other platform. Using Revel saved us a ton of time.” — Dominic Radford, Instrumentation and Controls Technician at @AaloAtomics When Executive Order 14301 called for reactors to reach criticality by July 4, 2026, Aalo used Revel to outpace legacy tools and successfully hit their deadline. Read the full story:

.@AaloAtomics designed its nuclear reactor to fit on a truck. That constraint shapes the vessel, the machines that build it, and the supply chain behind it. Chapter 2 of my visit to @AaloAtomics' Austin pilot factory. 0:00 A reactor that fits on a truck 0:24 Water jets and vessel size 0:55 Designing around existing machines 1:22 Rolling and welding the vessel 1:49 CNC machining 2:03 Thin steel and shorter lead times 2:45 Inside the pilot factory 3:10 Supply chains and "no unobtainium" 3:59 Designing for manufacturing 4:10 Next: liquid sodium

They may sound scary, but sodium reactors have some of the best passive safety properties in the game. Sodium has more than 400 reactor-years of operational experience, and yet has never had a notable radiation release to the public. Here's what keeps it safe: 1. Low pressure. The sodium pool operates near atmospheric pressure. There is no stored pressure energy to force radioactive material out. 2. High boiling point. Sodium operates around 450°C and boils at about 880°C. That is over 400 degrees of margin. 3. The coolant cannot drain away. The core sits in a double-walled pool, which sits in a reinforced guard vessel. Even with a leak, sodium stays around the core. 4. With metallic fuel (fast spectrum), the reactor slows itself down when it heats up. As fuel temperature rises, the chain reaction slows automatically. Even if the control rods did not insert, the reaction would still stop. 5. Decay heat is small. After shutdown, a 10 MWe core produces so little heat that the vessel can shed it to the surrounding air without pumps. This means you don't need backup power to keep the core cool, in a shut-down scenario. This was the challenge in Fukushima, where they lost backup power. 6. Accidents happen slowly. The sodium pool and the graphite hold a large amount of heat before temperatures rise much. In an accident, temperatures change over hours rather than seconds. This gives time to respond. 7. Sodium traps the most dangerous isotopes. Iodine and cesium bind chemically to sodium. In an accident, they stay in the pool instead of escaping to the air. 8. Cooling continues without power. Hot sodium rises and cool sodium sinks, so flow continues on its own if pumps fail. EBR-II demonstrated this at full power in 1986. 9. Small radioactive inventory. A 10 MWe reactor contains about 1% of the radioactive material in a large conventional plant. 10. The design lineage is proven. Sodium pool reactors have operated for decades. EBR-II ran for 30 years and passed deliberate tests where pumps were shut off and safety systems disabled at full power. The reactor shut itself down without human intervention.

"I think it's super exciting what's happening in Austin right now... there's just so much deep tech. We moved here because of a number of factors... look at the history of energy: Texas has played a massive role. And there's a few nuclear reactors, but not quite enough. So we're working on solving that. The future is bright for energy in Texas!" @MattLoszak with @Andercot

"I think it's super exciting what's happening in Austin right now... there's just so much deep tech. We moved here because of a number of factors... look at the history of energy: Texas has played a massive role. And there's a few nuclear reactors, but not quite enough. So we're working on solving that. The future is bright for energy in Texas!" @MattLoszak with @Andercot