Oklo Inc.

Oklo Inc. was co-founded in July 2013 in Santa Clara, California by Jacob DeWitte (CEO) and Caroline Cochran (COO), who met while both were pursuing graduate degrees in nuclear engineering at MIT. DeWitte, who holds a BS from the University of Florida and an SM and PhD from MIT, had grown up in Albuquerque captivated by nuclear energy since childhood visits to the National Nuclear Science Museum. Cochran holds a BA in economics and BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Oklahoma alongside an SM in nuclear engineering from MIT. They founded Oklo with the conviction that nuclear energy had been locked in a cycle of stagnation by a regulatory and construction paradigm built for large 1970s-era reactors, and that a startup-style, iterative approach — start small, prove the technology, and scale up — could break through it. Oklo went public via a SPAC merger with AltC Acquisition Corp (led by Sam Altman) in May 2024 and now trades on NYSE: OKLO. Sam Altman, who previously served as Oklo’s board chairman, stepped down in April 2025 ahead of potential OpenAI-Oklo partnership talks.

Oklo’s flagship product is the Aurora powerhouse — a liquid metal-cooled (sodium) fast fission reactor generating 15–75 MWe. As a fast reactor, Aurora uses fast neutrons rather than moderated (thermal) neutrons, which enables it to run on recycled spent nuclear fuel rather than freshly enriched uranium. Oklo also plans to build a fuel recycling facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to process HALEU from spent fuel — making its system genuinely circular in its fuel use. The Aurora is designed as a compact, largely underground structure with passive safety: if any anomaly occurs, the laws of physics — specifically the negative temperature coefficient of the sodium coolant — automatically shut the reactor down without operator intervention. Oklo intends to own and operate its reactors and sell electricity to customers on long-term contracts.

Oklo’s early investors include Hydrazine Capital (Sam Altman and Peter Thiel), Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder), Ron Conway, Tim Draper, and Kevin Efrusy. The SPAC merger in 2024 brought $306 million in gross proceeds. Oklo has an approximately 15 GW order book, including a 12 GW Master Power Agreement with Switch (one of the largest corporate power deals ever signed) and deals with Meta, Diamondback Energy, and Wyoming Hyperscale.

Oklo is the furthest-advanced fast reactor startup in the US. It became the first company since 2009 to have a combined license application accepted by the NRC — though the NRC ultimately denied it in 2022 for insufficient safety data. Oklo began pre-construction at Idaho National Laboratory in 2025 under the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program and aims to begin commercial operations at INL by 2028. In March 2025, Oklo acquired Atomic Alchemy, a radioisotope company, enabling it to produce medical and industrial isotopes as a secondary revenue stream from its reactor operations.