"It shows that, coming from the supply chain team, man, they're keeping those lines really updated. A pleasant surprise." — Marian Gilroy, Operations Lead, Radiant Nuclear
Radiant is building Kaleidos, the world's first mass-produced portable microreactor — a 1 MW reactor engineered to replace diesel generators for remote, critical, and defense power needs. Headquartered in El Segundo, California, and expanding to a second factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Radiant is backed by more than $518M in funding at a $1.8B valuation, with Lockheed Martin Ventures among its strategic investors. As a deep-tech hardware company operating under NQA-1 nuclear quality assurance and pursuing CMMC and FedRAMP readiness, Radiant runs in one of the most regulated manufacturing environments in the industrial sector.
As Radiant moved from engineering development into serial hardware production, informal processes and manual tracking could no longer hold. Parts synced from its PLM system into ION had no way to distinguish released revisions from drafts, risking builds against the wrong part version; outside-processing runs created false inventory that demanded manual cleanup; and NQA-1 audit prep raised the stakes further, with role-based approvals and full traceability chains becoming requirements rather than nice-to-haves. Radiant needed a system-of-record partner that could scale and adapt alongside its operations in real time.
Radiant began building on ION in 2023, selecting it as its manufacturing system of record ahead of its hardware build phase — recognizing it needed a platform purpose-built for complex, regulated scale-up manufacturing rather than a traditional ERP designed for stable, high-volume production. Over three years, as funding, headcount, and regulatory surface area expanded, that choice deepened into a hands-on engineering partnership.
First Resonance deployed ION as Radiant's primary system of record across manufacturing execution, supply chain, inventory, and quality. A dedicated FDSE team worked directly alongside Radiant's staff to build approval workflows, automate purchase-order routing, and connect the systems Radiant needed to meet its NQA-1 certification requirements — adapting ION in real time as the company scaled from development into serial production.
"I have a sneaking suspicion we may need to utilize even more FDSE time than initially expected. These have been pretty critical to rolling out some workflows, and critical to a lot of the regulatory requirements that are driving this demand." — Marian Gilroy, Operations Lead, Radiant Nuclear