Big energy projects, such as nuclear plants, solar farms, wind sites, battery storage, and data centres, often get delayed during siting and permitting. These steps can take 12 to 24 months, add up to $5 million in extra costs, and leave many projects stuck in regulatory or grid queues. As AI data centres drive up power demand and the energy transition accelerates, these delays cause major setbacks.
Nyxium, a deeptech company based in London, has launched an AI platform that uses teams of agents to handle geospatial analysis, regulatory compliance, grid issues, and community engagement simultaneously. This method cuts permitting timelines down to just a few months.
The company has signed a $235,000 contract with Kentucky’s Nuclear Energy Development Authority (KNEDA) and is in talks with more than 50 organisations in the nuclear, renewable, and data centre industries.
To help the company grow, Nyxium raised £2.4 million in pre-seed funding from Visionaries Tomorrow and EWOR.
Help strong projects move fast and stay on track
Nyxium’s story starts with Dr Thiri Shwesin Aung, who saw her family lose everything in a resource conflict in Myanmar over a decade ago. She turned to spatial data and early AI to map the damage work that helped international legal cases. That experience sparked Nyxium: an environmental intelligence platform now turning heads at major governments and organisations (yes, acquisition talks are already happening).
Dr Paul Seurin, her co-founder, worked for years in nuclear modelling and saw that many promising projects failed because of poor site selection, permitting delays, or grid problems—not technical issues. Together, they set out to solve these problems.
How does it work? Nyxium’s AI agents scan maps, regulations, power lines, land rules, and even local concerns. They flag the best sites and prep permit packages. The team holds patents for their data setup and agent coordination, blending computer vision, nuclear know-how, and live regulatory updates.
Dr Thiri Shwesin Aung explains to TFN, “Nyxium is an AI-driven infrastructure intelligence platform that combines geospatial analysis, regulatory intelligence, grid constraints, and community risk into a single decision system. What sets us apart is that we focus on deployable sites — not theoretical suitability — with over 99% reliability in identifying sites that can realistically be permitted and built. We also support the full lifecycle, from early siting through permitting readiness and beyond.”
While tools like Esri ArcGIS focus on mapping, UpNext handles permitting filings, and others like The Land Bank or Overland AI tackle specific tasks, Nyxium offers a complete solution from site selection to project approval.
What about diversity, and what’s it like being female in tech?
On diversity, Dr Thiri Shwesin Aung notes, “Our team spans multiple nationalities and disciplinary backgrounds across energy, geospatial science, AI, and policy. As an early-stage company, we focus on building diverse leadership from the outset rather than retrofitting it later.”
On being female in tech, Dr Thiri Shwesin Aung adds, “Building in deep tech and infrastructure as a woman founder has required persistence and clarity — particularly in sectors traditionally dominated by engineering and finance. My advice to others is to stay anchored in real problems, build technical credibility early, and not wait for permission to take space at the table.”
What’s next?
What’s next? The new funding will go into platform upgrades, hiring engineers, and onboarding early customers. First up: nuclear (including small modular reactors), plus solar, wind, storage, and data centres, where the big players are already circling.
Dr Thiri Shwesin Aung concludes, “Over the next three to five years, our objective is to become the core decision infrastructure for large-scale energy and data systems globally, supporting thousands of infrastructure siting and permitting decisions annually. We aim to operate across multiple geographies and be embedded upstream in projects representing tens of gigawatts of energy capacity and large-scale data infrastructure deployments.”