How GBS helped accelerate Deep Fission’s remarkable journey
At the 2024 YPO Global Business Summit (GBS), Liz Muller stood before her fellow YPO members with an early-stage company that had only recently emerged from stealth mode. During Deal Tank, a live pitch competition at GBS, she offered a rare opportunity to invest. Less than two years later, Deep Fission (FISN) is publicly traded on the Nasdaq.
The journey illustrates how the conversations that begin at GBS can lead to extraordinary business opportunities.
Deep Fission was Liz Muller’s second company. It was founded to tackle one of the defining challenges of the artificial intelligence (AI) era: how to meet rising energy demand while delivering reliable, low-carbon power. The company is developing a new approach to nuclear energy by leveraging pressurized water reactor technology and drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry. It aims to make nuclear power faster, more affordable and easier to deploy.
Nuclear fission, Muller explains, is “very, very simple.”
Turning potential into progress
The real complexity — the time and cost — comes from everything built around the reactor: the containment buildings, pressurization systems and other safety infrastructure required above ground.
“We’re not inventing new reactor physics,” she says. “We’re just having it deployed in a different environment.” By placing small modular reactors deep underground, the surrounding rock and water perform many of those functions naturally. “Deep Fission is the only one doing it in a borehole a mile underground,” Muller adds. “So, our vision for this is pretty unique.”
The goal is to develop a design that can ultimately be built “much, much faster and much, much cheaper than we’ve ever been able to do before,” Muller explains.
Following GBS, Deep Fission’s momentum continued to build. The company quickly raised further funding, gaining significant market traction.
“And then we just kept growing,” she says. “We took the decision to go public less than a year after GBS. The whole process took about a year, and just this past month we finally got listed on the Nasdaq and are now trading as a public company.”
Muller has little doubt that GBS accelerated Deep Fission’s journey to market.
— Liz Muller, Chief Executive Officer at Deep Fission share
The capital mattered. So did the validation. But what made GBS unique was the opportunity to put an early-stage business in front of hundreds of experienced entrepreneurs from vastly different industries.
“It was a great chance to validate what we’re building,” she says, “to see if this is something that would resonate with a broader market than the VCs we’d been narrowly targeting up to that point.”
The caliber of the YPO audience mattered, too. “They had great questions,” Muller recalls. “Every one of them was making me think about things differently.”
YPO members approached the business as fellow entrepreneurs, offering perspectives that would continue to shape Deep Fission long after the summit had ended.
But the investment opportunity was only part of Muller’s GBS experience. During the summit she joined panels on AI and leadership, conversations that would prove just as influential to Deep Fission’s future as the capital it raised.
One recurring theme was one of the defining questions of the AI revolution: How will we generate enough power to support it? For Muller, the answer was obvious. “Well, if you need power, you need nuclear power, and here’s where Deep Fission can help,” she says.
The conversations around AI also shaped Muller’s thinking. As a young company, Deep Fission was still deciding how it wanted to grow. “We wanted to be an AI-native company from the beginning,” she says. Rather than bolting AI onto existing processes, the goal was to build it into the business from Day 1.
The discussions at GBS reinforced that ambition, helping define how the company would use AI as it scaled. That decision to grow as an AI-native company, Muller adds, has been helpful in terms of how they use their resources efficiently.
One connection in particular would prove especially valuable. “It also led to my meeting Stuart Lacey,” Muller says. “We ended up bringing him in as a fractional AI officer.” For Muller, the appointment illustrated how GBS had influenced Deep Fission, “not just on the investment side, but also in the ‘how we grow’ side.”
Why the right room matters
Asked what advice she would give a fellow YPO member considering attending GBS, Muller doesn’t hesitate. The greatest opportunities, she says, aren’t always the ones you expect. While the opportunity to invest in Deep Fission may have first drawn members to Deal Tank, the conversations that followed ultimately proved just as valuable.
“The connections that we get through YPO are really just incredibly valuable,” Muller says. “YPOers think like CEOs.”
From investment and validation to AI strategy and leadership, GBS shaped Deep Fission in ways Muller could never have predicted before she arrived.
“And that’s why if you go in with an open mind and are just open to learning from people who you trust and believe in and have this sort of peerdom with, I think it really can impact your business and impact your world.”
YPO members can join the GBS 2026 in Istanbul by registering here.
