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…n developing a world-class counter-fraud division to let Radar handle the fraud. So you can get back to building your product. Go to stripe.com/radar. Tell me about the supply chain for nuclear fuels. Yeah, I mean, so you dig uranium out of the ground and then you need to convert it to a gaseous state so that you can enrich it. You put in a centrifuge, it goes like this, and the heavier isotopes go out and the lighter ones stay in and you can pick those out and make those into your fuel. The mining part has been something that we've hardly kept alive. I mean there was at one point a couple of mining operations going in the US where the last 10 years or so, it's been like 1% of nuclear used in the US was actually domestically mined and now— Where are the last uranium mines in the US? They're places like where you would think. Texas, Wyoming, those sorts of places, in the Western states. But now again, like everything else have said, “Okay, wake up. Let's actually reshore some of this stuff.” So we're starting to see more uranium mining. Conversion and enrichment is still largely done overseas. And yeah, we're still buying almost 50% of our uranium from Russia and ex-Soviet states. So I think it is important that we're thinking about how do we have far more of a domestic supply chain? We have the ability to do it. We have the uranium and actually there's a little bit of Silicon Valley DNA entering the space with General Matter, which is Scott Nolan's company out of Founders Fund. So he's getting into the enrichment space, and so I think— And they're a uranium enrichment company? They're an uranium enrichment company, which is real picks and shovels for a real hard atoms business to do that. But I think it's really meaningful work. I think it's really important. Do you care more about the mining, the enrichment happening in the US or just there has to be an independent supply chain for the whole thing? I think you just want diversity. You don't want everything from one place, and I think we do want to have capability. So I think all of it should be at least partially done here and with our allies. How did you end up starting Antares? Gosh. Most people do not happen upon this kind of idea. No, you don't really happen upon it. I was working at SpaceX at the time when I first started reading about nuclear, and it was when I was actually working on getting Starlinks into Ukraine. So after Russia invaded Ukraine. And I just started reading more about the conflict there, probably more than I normally would have because I was actually speaking with Ukrainians and thinking about what was going on there. And I was a history major, so I think there was just a little bit of like, oh, geopolitics, resources are important. Russia has a lot of resources. Randomly, my cousin is the CEO of a glass factory making literally glasses like this, and he is like, “We're going bankrupt because of energy prices.” And you're like, “Golly, what is going on?” And then I read about Germany and the nuclear power plants. They were shutting off to turn on coal in a place that is like… Green party. Crazy, right? How did you arrive at that as a beachhead? g on?” And then I read about Germany and the nuclear power plants. They were shutting off to turn on coal in a place that is like… Green party. Crazy, right? How did you arrive at that as a beachhead? I think you just say, where can you go that you don't have to compete on that LCOE level against the cheap solar panels? Where do you go where there's a real need and mission assurance for something critical to the military? They will pay for that. This is also an area where they were obviously behind the Manhattan Project. They're here to help develop new technologies, and so what a great partner to have when trying to do something like this. Has DARPA played with this stuff at all? Or has it come from… It sounds like you're working with the main branches of the military. Yeah, we are not working with DARPA, mostly because it's actually not as technically risky as you might even think. They prefer things further at the risk curve. Exactly. We actually, in a funny way, it's not even really a tech problem. Totally. I mean it's hard. It's hard to build these things. It's not— But someone just needs to go out to— It’s not novel in that way. That's interesting. What lessons have you brought from your prior experience at SpaceX, at Opendoor to building Antares? One of the things I really took away from SpaceX was just really getting into it. It's a very confrontational culture and it's not afraid to say, “Screw your next meeting. We need to keep talking about this.” And I love that. I want to bring that energy everywhere I go. It's like if you are unsure about something, if you're questioning something, you should probably stop and dig into it. We had this thing called the “five whys”, I don’t know if—it's like one of these Silicon Valley little quips, but it's like that on steroids, and I think that the pausing to probe super deeply, question things, really hash things out was a big takeaway. I learned like, wow, it's really effective at getting to the right answer, at making a decisions, at changing course when you need to. And so I've tried to bring some of that to Antares. Investors are hot and cold on hard tech depending on when you're raising money and everything like this. Presumably there’s a J curve in investing in Antares where there's definitely some R&D before you eventually start paying it back with revenues. Just how has the experience of raising money for this? It's going to get harder. I think it hasn't been hard to date only because there is interest and excitement around nuclear. It's also just fewer dollars in the beginning. You're kind of in the honeymoon phase of all of that. I think it will get harder. I think now the time’s a ticking. It's like, okay, let's see your next technical milestones. This criticality test. Obviously the full reactor at the end of 2027. I think it will be challenging. And there are several reactor companies out there, so it's a bit of a race. I think it's going to be fun. I mean, I wonder what Polymarket would have to say. Several reactor companies out there, even at the end of the market that you guys are going after. t's a bit of a race. I think it's going to be fun. I mean, I wonder what Polymarket would have to say. Several reactor companies out there, even at the end of the market that you guys are going after. Everyone has their different niche. I think our niche is, again, the smallest, the most DOD-oriented. There's a lot of micro-reactor companies or SMR that are going after data centers and the data center buildout, which is an amazing market. I mean amazing. I think people will pay a lot more. Again, going back to the premium power point, they will pay more for power for this. Not exactly our target market. So your niche in the market, it seems like you guys have selected a part of the market where maybe there's less competition. There's still some people going after the military applications. There always are. I mean, if you have a good idea, there's going to be a few people working on it. How capital-intensive is it going to be to get your product to market? In the hundreds of millions. It depends on what you mean by to market. So I think our big milestone is like, can you build a reactor, prove it, turn it on, it's producing power. Then I think you can think about interesting layers of capital in terms of pre-orders for your reactor. This was going to be my next question. When does the money arrive? Yeah, exactly. Bigger government grants. So we're kind of still in the hundreds of thousands of… Single-digit millions of dollars of grants that we are getting right now. But you're moving into the tens of millions of dollars R&D grants, and then you want to eventually move into that kind of program-of-record real dollars. There's a really interesting program right now that the Army has put out called the Janus Program. Are you familiar with the COTS program that SpaceX used to bring to kind of develop their first reactor? Not by name, but I'm familiar with— Commercial Orbital Transport System. Yeah, yeah. I'm familiar. It was like the innovation basically to say, “Let's try something that's not cost plus and let's actually do something that's milestone-based and basically we'll cut you if you don't hit the milestone. And it’s fixed contract, we're not going to pay you for whatever.” So anyway, the Army has taken that model a bit and I think used that as inspiration for this Janus Program where they're saying we're going to fund up to three to five companies to build their first prototype alongside us, kind of out of base. And then we will choose a winner and we want to build five to 10 reactors, if not more, on bases. So they're like, the demand signal now is hot. This is great for our future fundraising for the industry in general. It's very, very good demand. A lot of ink gets spilled on military US defense contracting. What is your experience as someone who's attempting to sell to the military been?…

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