Valar Atomics

Valar Atomics was founded on July 4, 2023 in El Segundo, California by Isaiah Taylor, who serves as Founder and CEO. Taylor is a remarkable founder: an autodidact who says he became obsessed with nuclear reactors at age 16 after recognizing they were being built too large to ever be economically reproduced, and who married his childhood sweetheart at 19 before founding Valar at 24. His great-grandfather was a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Taylor co-founded Valar with others including Mark Mitchell, former president of Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, who serves as Chief Nuclear Officer, and Muhammad Shahzad, former president and CFO of Relativity Space, who joined the leadership team. The company moved its reactor operations to Orangeville, Utah in 2026.

Valar’s reactor design is a high-temperature gas reactor (HTGR) using TRISO fuel particles (the same meltdown-proof fuel type used by Kairos, X-energy, and Radiant), graphite moderation, and helium coolant. The reactor operates at approximately 800–950°C — far hotter than conventional light-water reactors — making it ideal not just for electricity generation but for high-temperature industrial processes including thermochemical hydrogen production via the sulfur-iodine cycle, enabling Valar to produce carbon-neutral synthetic fuels. The company’s commercial vision is the “gigasite” — a campus of hundreds to thousands of standardized Ward 250 reactors (~250 MWt each) at a single location, producing hydrogen, synthetic hydrocarbons, data center power, and industrial heat at commodity scale. The Ward 250 is designed to be walkaway safe without operator intervention under any accident scenario.

Valar raised $149 million in total as of early 2026, including a $130 million Series A closed in November 2025, led by Snowpoint Ventures and Day One Ventures, with notable participation from Palmer Luckey (Anduril founder) and Shyam Sankar (Palantir CTO). The company was selected for the DOE’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program under President Trump’s executive orders.

In perhaps the most dramatic technical milestone of any nuclear startup, Valar achieved zero-power (“cold”) criticality on November 17, 2025 at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Criticality Experiments Research Center — making it the first venture-backed company in history to achieve a self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction. The experiment used HALEU TRISO fuel in Valar’s graphite-moderated Nova Core, validating the reactor’s neutronic design. Valar subsequently broke ground on its first full-power Ward 250 test reactor at the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County, Utah, and has signed an MOU with the Philippines Nuclear Research Institute to deploy its first international reactor.