Radiant

Every passenger jet you have ever flown shares the same basic shape: a tube with wings. It has barely changed in seventy years. We led Natilus's $28 million Series A because Aleksey Matyushev and his team are finally changing it.

A new shape for flight

Natilus builds blended-wing-body aircraft, where the fuselage and wings merge into a single lifting surface. The result is dramatic: up to 30 percent less fuel burned, half the carbon emissions, half the operating cost, and 40 percent more cargo volume than a conventional plane of the same footprint. Its first aircraft, the KONA, is a regional freighter carrying 3.8 tons. A larger passenger model, Horizon, follows.

Why we led the round

Aviation is one of the hardest industries in the world to break into, which is exactly why almost no one tries. Natilus already has an order book of more than 570 aircraft worth roughly $24 billion, from customers including Flexport, SpiceJet, Nolinor Aviation, and Ameriflight. That is real demand pulling a new airframe into existence.

“The aviation market is ripe for a new aircraft manufacturing entrant.”
Tim Draper

The $28 million round, which we led, takes Natilus from design and demand to building airplanes. As founder Aleksey Matyushev puts it, the company is not just building aircraft, it is reshaping how the world moves goods and people. We could not agree more, and we are proud to be the lead investor backing it.

We led Radiant's Series D of more than $300 million, alongside Boost VC, because the company has done something the nuclear industry has talked about for decades and never delivered: it built a reactor you can ship.

What Radiant is building

Radiant builds portable nuclear microreactors small enough to fit on a truck. The first unit, called Kaleidos, produces one megawatt of clean power, enough to run a remote community, a disaster zone, a military base, or a data center, with no connection to the grid. It runs on TRISO fuel, the most rugged nuclear fuel ever made, goes five years between refuelings, and is designed to operate for twenty.

Founder and CEO Doug Bernauer started Radiant in 2020 after years at SpaceX, where he went looking for a way to power a base on Mars and realized the same problem was unsolved on Earth. The Series D, which values the company north of $1.8 billion, funds the leap from prototype to production.

Why we backed it

Most energy bets are bets on a slightly better version of what already exists. This is not that. Radiant is moving toward its first fueled demonstration at Idaho National Laboratory in 2026 and is building its R-50 production reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the same ground where the Manhattan Project began. Commercial demand is already arriving ahead of the first unit. We were joined in the round by Founders Fund, Chevron Technology Ventures, the Ark Venture Fund, and Friends and Family Capital.

“Radiant Nuclear just raised $300M+ and we were honored to lead the financing. Radiant's team is both visionary and able to execute, a powerful combination.”
Tim Draper

Clean power that arrives by truck and switches on anywhere is exactly the kind of bet we exist to make.