department-of-defense
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Jordan Bramble
Jordan Bramble is the co-founder and CEO of Antares Nuclear (Antares Industries), a Torrance, California company building factory-produced, transportable fission microreactors of up to 1 MW for defense, remote industrial, and space applications. A systems engineer and physicist who did a stint in federal policy at the White House Office of Management and Budget, Bramble started Antares in 2023 on a contrarian bet: instead of chasing the commercial grid on price, sell nuclear's unique capability to customers who need power where the grid and diesel can't reach. Under his leadership Antares raised more than $130 million, built out a 145,000-square-foot factory, and in June 2026 became the first private company to bring an advanced reactor - its Mark-0 - to criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program. His stated ambition is to make energy abundant 'from Earth to the Asteroid Belt.'
Sumit Agarwal
Sumit Agarwal is the CEO and co-founder of Ario, a Palo Alto AI assistant that takes aim at the 'invisible labor' of running a household - the school calendars, the returns, the meal planning. Before Ario he co-founded Shape Security, a fraud-prevention company F5 acquired for more than $1 billion. Earlier he was the youngest-ever Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, a retired US Air Force major and one of the first officers in network warfare at Cyber Command, and ran mobile operations at Google. Ario raised $16 million in seed funding in June 2024 from Floodgate, Wing Venture Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and Moxxie.