Richard Muller is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Deep Fission, a nuclear energy company developing modular reactors installed one mile underground in deep boreholes.

Richard is Professor Emeritus of Physics at UC Berkeley, where he earned his Ph.D. under Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez and has been on faculty since 1978. He co-founded Berkeley Earth in 2010 and Deep Isolation in 2016 with his daughter Elizabeth.

Richard received the MacArthur Fellowship in 1982, the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award in 1978, and shared the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the Supernova Cosmology Project. He founded the project that led to the discovery of dark energy and has published over 140 scientific articles.

Deep Fission raised $4M in seed funding from 8VC in 2024, followed by $30M in September 2025, and an additional $80M in February 2026. The company was selected for the DOE Reactor Pilot Program and broke ground on its first pilot reactor in Kansas in December 2025.

Deep Fission is targeting a levelized cost of electricity of 5 to 7 cents per kWh and aims to reduce nuclear construction costs by 70 to 80% compared to traditional plants. The company has announced a development pipeline representing 12.5 GW of future planned deployments.