Eight Startups Selected for Launch Alaska Portfolio
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Photo Credit: ALONESEB | ENVATO
Two Anchorage companies are among eight added to Launch Alaska’s portfolio of energy and technology startups. The cohort successfully completed the 2025/2026 Tech Deployment Track, which compresses time and attention to forge partnerships, identify projects, and move promising concepts toward deployment in Alaska.
Launch Alaska defines success as startups finding investors and project partners to deploy their solutions in Alaska.
Switch-Flippers and Game-Changers
A dozen companies from coast to coast participated in the Tech Deployment Track. The eight selected for the portfolio give Launch Alaska a total of fifty-three companies under its wing, each developing new ideas in the energy, transportation, and industrial sectors.
One of the local selections is already up and running: Remote Hands, a workforce services company that places technicians in rural communities. Founder and CEO Gabriel Low was a teacher in Quinhagak when he saw the need for locally sourced skilled labor. He started the gig work platform in 2025, compiling a vetted roster of technicians in rural communities for tasks as simple as switching equipment off and on again, which might otherwise cost $10,000 to fly a technician from a city.
The other Anchorage selection, Applied Atomics, is developing what founder Ben Kellie calls “the Falcon 9 of nuclear power plants.” Kellie, a former Bush pilot, helped develop the Falcon 9 reusable rocket at SpaceX, and after he sold his rocket support startup The Launch Company, he pivoted to nuclear energy. Applied Atomics is proposing a small modular reactor in the 100 MW to 1,000 MW range, as big as the most powerful conventional generators in Alaska, and then some. Some other Launch Alaska portfolio companies, Oklo and Radiant, are proposing nuclear reactors in the 5 MW to 10 MW range.
Two other portfolio companies are developing hydropower technologies: BladeRunner Energy of Bend, Oregon, and Natel Energy of Alameda, California. BladeRunner’s hydrokinetic in-river technology is built for remote deployments and designed for integration with microgrids. Natel Energy uses proprietary computer modeling and scale-model testing to ensure the safe passage of fish through hydropower turbines.
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Other new energy startups in the portfolio are GridWrap of San Diego, California, selling a patch material to ruggedize power poles, for more efficient use of assets; Somerville, Massachusetts-based Eden Geopower, seeking to revolutionize hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas by replacing fluid injection with its “electrical reservoir stimulation” method; and GeoKiln of Houston, Texas, developer of a technique for producing hydrogen from iron-rich subsurface rocks.
Another chemistry innovator is OCOChem of Richland, Washington. The company has pioneered the industrialization of advanced Carbon FluX Electrolyzer technology to convert carbon dioxide and water into organic molecules using electricity. The output product, formate, is an industrial chemical that can also be used as fuel.
Founded in 2016 and based in Anchorage, Launch Alaska is a nonprofit accelerator focused on helping climate tech companies find customers, deploy projects, earn revenue, and make an impact in Alaska. Portfolio companies continue to work with Launch Alaska to develop projects and get technology into the Alaska communities that need it most. While some startups remain speculative, others in the Launch Alaska portfolio are already plugged in. Greensparc, for example, set up a modular data center at Cordova Electric Cooperative’s Humpback Creek Hydro facility in 2024.
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