• Aalo Atomics secured $100 million to develop mass-manufactured nuclear reactors.
• The startup aims to mass-produce small modular reactors to power data centers amid the AI boom.
• Valor Equity Partners led the round, with participation from Harpoon Ventures and Alumni Ventures.

One Austin-based startup may have the answer to a crucial problem that the AI industry is still stuck on: how to power it all.

Aalo Atomics says the answer isn't the hulking nuclear plants of decades past. Instead, it's betting on mass-manufactured smaller reactors built to sit beside the data centers they'll fuel.

That pitch earned the company a hefty check. Aalo recently closed a $100 million Series B, CEO Matt Loszak told Business Insider. Valor Equity Partners led the round, and Harpoon Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and others participated, bringing Aalo's total funding to north of $136 million.

The startup's trajectory shows just how tightly AI and energy are now linked. Aalo CEO Matt Loszak said he cofounded the startup "hand-in-hand" with the AI boom.

"When we started the company, we had data centers high up on our list," he told Business Insider. "Very rapidly, we were like, 'OK, we have to focus the entire company around this.'"

Loszak and Yasir Arafat, the company's chief technology officer, founded Aalo in 2023 to make mass-manufactured nuclear power plants. The company's main product is the Aalo Pod, a small modular reactor built to power data centers. Aalo says one Pod can power roughly 50,000 homes, or one data center, Loszak said.

"Nuclear really is the ultimate underdog," Loszak said. He called it "the most misunderstood technology I've ever seen in my life," citing skepticism of the safety of nuclear power.

In August, the Department of Energy selected Aalo to test the company's experimental power plant Aalo-X, which it plans to complete construction for in 2026, at Idaho National Laboratory under the Trump administration's Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program. This program aims to speed up testing of advanced reactor designs and authorize deployment at sites beyond national labs.

Aalo isn't the only company getting a boost from Washington. Ten nuclear companies—including Antares Nuclear, Radiant Industries, Valar Atomics, and Sam Altman-backed Oklo—have been tapped for the DOE's initiative.

Big Tech companies have also increasingly become interested in leveraging nuclear power to fuel AI ambitions.

Aalo plans to take its technology global

Aalo aims to eventually take its factory-built model global. In the future, Aalo hopes to mass-produce reactors in large facilities like its 40,000 square-foot Austin factory, ship them to sites around the world, and assemble them on location. Over time, Loszak said, the company hopes to work with a network of partner developers who would handle installation and operation of the Aalo Pods.

For now, the company hopes to partner with customers "willing to pay a premium because they value the speed," Loszak said, namely, cloud giants with data center projects in the works. The company declined to disclose which hyperscalers it's working with.

Aalo also plans to eventually "bring costs as low as possible to help bring more energy to everyone," Loszak said. Ultimately, it aims to cut energy costs to around three cents per kilowatt hour, though Aalo's prices are currently higher than this, Loszak said. Energy costs can vary greatly depending on location, and electricity across all sectors in the US averages about 13 cents per kilowatt hour as of May 2025, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Aalo will use the new funding to double its staff, growing from about 60 employees now to 120 within the next year. It will focus on hiring engineers and manufacturing talent. That's a sharp increase for a startup that was just Loszak and Arafat less than two years ago.

Betting on nuclear power

Loszak's interest in nuclear power is personal. He said he developed asthma while growing up in Canada due to coal-plant smog. Once the country expanded nuclear power, though, Loszak said his symptoms disappeared.

"Lo and behold, smog days went to zero, and my asthma went away," Loszak said. "I thought, 'my God, this technology is incredible.'"

Previously, Loszak cofounded Humi, an HR software startup that Employment Hero acquired for over $100 million in January.

Arafat, Aalo's cofounder and CTO, brings the nuclear chops. He started his career at Westinghouse Electric Company and later worked on MARVEL, an advanced nuclear reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory. Arafat earned his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University.

"When I met him, I just knew he was the right guy to partner with. We had really similar values, a similar vision for what nuclear should become, and even a similar sense of humor, which is important because we spend a lot of time together," Loszak said of Arafat.

Loszak said Aalo's investor, Valor, is a "special partner" for the startup because of its relationships with big data center projects.

Valor backed Elon Musk's xAI in a $6 billion Series B in 2024, and the investment firm is in talks with lenders to secure up to $12 billion for xAI's plan to buy a large sum of Nvidia chips for a new mega-sized data center, The Wall Street Journal reported in July. Valor also participated in AI infrastructure company Crusoe's $600 million Series D in late 2024.

• "If you come to Palantir, your career is set," Palantir CEO Alex Karp said on Monday's earnings call.
• Dozens of Palantir alums have become startup founders, raising over $30 billion from investors.
• Some tech recruiters told us they're more interested in what candidates have built than whether they worked at Palantir.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp talks a big game when it comes to his employees, calling a job there "by far the best credential in tech."

So, do recruiters agree?

Karp has boasted on several occasions that Palantirians, as the company refers to employees, are the crème de la crème of tech workers.

"If you come to Palantir, your career is set," Karp said on Monday's earnings call. He's previously said that "no credible institution in commercial life can really be built without Palantir or an ex-Palantirian."

Palantir has minted founders and startups in droves.

Former Palantir alums have raised over $30 billion total at an average valuation of almost $800 million per company, according to AI predictive intelligence firm CB Insights. That figure is somewhat skewed by defense tech darling Anduril, which recently raised at a $30.5 billion post-money valuation in June.

Three Anduril cofounders — Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, and Brian Schimpf — all worked at Palantir before starting Anduril alongside Palmer Luckey in 2017, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Over 6% of founders who previously worked at Palantir started companies now worth over $1 billion, according to CB Insights.

Palantir, which reported just under 4,000 full-time employees as of December 2024, grew its revenue to $1 billion in the second quarter of 2025, a first for the company. Karp called the earnings "bombastic," and in his letter to shareholders Monday, said Palantir's skeptics have been "defanged and bent into a kind of submission." The stock is up over 600% in the last year.

So do the people hiring from the tech talent pool buy Karp's glowing view of Palantirians?

Business Insider spoke to more than half a dozen tech recruiting professionals to find out if having Palantir on your résumé is as powerful as Karp has made it sound.

The Goldman Sachs of tech

Deepali Vyas, a senior partner and global head of data, AI, and fintech at global consulting firm Korn Ferry, told BI she can "absolutely say that he's right," and she considers Palantir the Goldman Sachs of the tech industry.

"I've pulled people from Palantir," Vyas said. "They are a home run every single time."

Vyas said Palantir employees tend to work long hours, and the company has a "very hands-on culture" that allows even junior employees to work alongside the firm's "brightest minds." Having that proximity helps create a certain level of training, she added.

Vyas said another factor that makes Palantir stand out is its ability to recruit people who are passionate about their work.

"There's something in the sauce there," Vyas said. "They want to work on the complex problems because that's what excites them."

Janelle Bieler, the head of US tech talent at global tech talent and engineering company Akkodis, told Business Insider that Palantir is known for hiring elite talent and candidates that tackle complex issues. While candidates still need to be individually evaluated on what they worked on at the company, she said working at Palantir signals "intellectual horsepower."

"When a recruiter sees it on a résumé, it usually signals that this person went through a tough interview process and likely that they can hold their own in a pretty rigorous and fast-paced environment," she said.

Bieler added that Palantir's branding also stands out to recruiters. She said Palantir is neither regarded as Big Tech nor a typical startup, and the name has a level of mystique. Given the company's niche work environment, though, recruiters want to know that candidates can thrive in a variety of workplace settings.

Jason Saltzman, head of insights at CB Insights, previously told Business Insider while working at a company that tracks employment changes, that "Palantir seems to be the stop on people's career journey that accelerates them the most." Almost a quarter of former product managers at Palantir have since become founders, he said.

Ex-Palantir employees also tend to end up at a Big Tech company or "one of the hottest startups," Saltzman said. Google and Meta, as well as Anduril and OpenAI, employ many former Palantir workers, he said.

"Not only is Palantir a rubber stamp on someone's résumé that allows them to go onto whatever they do next, but also many of them want to go solve the world's biggest problems that are shaping the future as we know it, either by joining a company or starting their own," Saltzman said.

"That Palantir stamp gives the founder credibility, which makes hiring early employees easier," said Alex Klein, founding partner at Nucleus Talent. Klein's company hires partner-level venture investors and early leadership for startups. He hasn't done any work for Palantir.

"A founder or CEO who worked at Palantir for three years — even if they're 27 years old — will win the recruiting battle against the 35-year-old founder who worked at a tier two tech company," Klein added. "Palantir is absolutely a gold star on a résumé."

Some say Karp could be overstating things

Aaron Sines, director of technical recruiting at global cloud consulting firm Edison & Black, told Business Insider that while there's some truth to Karp's statement, overall he's seeing a "results revolution" among companies, where outcomes are placed above academic credentials and company names.

"My team tells me all the time results are almost always coming over academic credentials," Sines said.

Natan Fisher, the cofounder and co-CEO of tech and legal recruiting firm SingleSprout, similarly said that "execution matters more than brand," adding that "companies that want six plus days in the office are going to optimize for someone who is hungry and scrappy above all else."

"No doubt, Palantir is a strong hiring signal, but the idea of a golden ticket in tech is outdated," Fisher said. "The real hiring market doesn't reward brand names alone, it rewards execution and adaptability — who built what and scaled systems at speed."

While a gig at Palantir alone isn't necessarily a career maker, Fisher has seen an increase in tech companies hiring Forward Deployed Engineers, a job title Palantir coined for software engineers who work directly with customers.

Fisher said that tech companies often seek to hire from "multiple high-caliber" talent pools such as Ramp, Stripe, Linear, and Notion, adding that they aren't clients of his.

Sines said that Palantir has a reputation for seeking out top talent and having a "rigorous" and "results-oriented" hiring strategy. However, he said that while it carries a "badge of honor," for some clients, it may signal too much intensity for others. It depends on how companies perceive culture, Sines said.

Farah Sharghi, a job search coach and former recruiter at tech companies including Google, Lyft, Uber, and TikTok, said that while Palantir's hiring process is "very stringent," a good employee at Palantir may not be a good employee everywhere else because "there might be some nuances to some companies versus others in terms of cultural fit."

"It's really subjective relative to what the company does, what their needs are, and so on," she said.

While culture may vary across tech companies, Sharghi says the guiding philosophy when it comes to hiring is largely the same across the board.

"They're not looking for breadth of experience," she said. "They're looking for technical depth of experience."

Calling Palantir the best credential in tech, as Karp did, "flattens the reality," she added.

"Tech is broad. What makes someone a great hire at Palantir doesn't always translate to, for example, a legacy company trying to modernize systems," she said. "That takes a different skill set. There's no universal best, only fit for the problem at hand."

• Palmer Luckey teased the idea of Auduril manufacturing American-made computers.
• Luckey joined the Reindustrialize Summit in Detroit virtually.
• The Anduril founder also emphasized the importance of working with partners to build tools.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, the defense tech giant that makes weapons and military products, announced that it could produce American-made computers at the Reindustrialize Summit, a conference about modernizing American manufacturing, in Detroit on Thursday.

"This is one of those things where I started talking to companies years ago about this," Luckey said. "I think there's a chance that it's going to be Anduril."

Luckey added that Anduril has held conversations with "everyone you would need to have to do that," including people "on the chip side, on the assembly side, on the manufacturing side."

Anduril doesn't yet make computers, and Luckey isn't completely sold on the effort. He told the crowd: "There are some things Anduril has to do," he said. "There are other things we'd rather have other people do. This is something I'd rather have other people do."

American-made computers aren't a novel concept. PC-maker Dell had several manufacturing plants throughout the US, but in 2009, it closed its North Carolina plant and announced a change to its international manufacturing partner, moving from Ireland to Poland.

Luckey, who addressed the crowd virtually and with a humanoid robot from Foundation, also added that Anduril will not build its own humanoid robot: "We're going to partner with other companies where it makes sense," he said.

Anduril, which was cofounded by Luckey in 2017, makes hardware for the US military, including drones and underwater submersibles, and an AI-powered software platform, Lattice. The company is also working on extended reality headsets and other wearables for the military in a partnership with Meta, which the companies announced in May.

Luckey declined to share what he would name the computer if he were to make it, but hinted that "it's pro-American, and also a gambling reference, but I'll leave it at that."