Valency joins the Genesis Mission 🚀
Valency is helping Berkeley Lab use AI agents to unlock decades of nuclear power research.
Valency was founded with the goal of helping open-research flourish in the age of agentic science, to benefit humanity. Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Valency has joined the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission to work towards our vision: we will accelerate nuclear power research with AI.
The United States is a leader in nuclear power research, yet a potential treasure trove of new breakthroughs and insights lay sequestered in archives of millions of reports, engineering drawings, operational logs, and photographs. Currently, before a document can be released out in the open, a trained expert must confirm that it is safe to share. There are few people qualified to make that call, and they have to work through the archive one document at a time. This bottleneck limits access to valuable research and historic innovations, leading engineers to repeat work to rediscover what may already be known.
Today, we get to help change that, and we are very excited about it.
HERALD, the project we are building with senior scientists Daniela Ushizima, Peter Nugent, and colleagues at Berkeley Lab, has been selected for a Department of Energy award through the Genesis Mission.
The project will use special-purpose AI agents leveraging Valency’s infrastructure to help experts review this enormous archive.
Our Valency team is proud to support the Genesis Mission and the acceleration of American science innovation.
HERALD stands for High-throughput ECI Review and Agentic Legacy Document processing. It is exactly the kind of ambitious, consequential problem we started Valency to work on.
The official announcement is here: https://genesis.energy.gov/
Launched by executive order in November 2025, the Genesis Mission brings the Department of Energy’s seventeen national laboratories together with industry and academia. Its goal is to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.
Our selection came through a highly competitive process, and Valency is one of only a few dozen private companies to be funded through Genesis. Earning national recognition like this at an early-stage startup makes the moment especially rewarding.
What HERALD does
HERALD gives AI agents the first pass through the archive. They will read text and images together, handle routine material, flag anything that needs closer attention, and show the evidence behind every recommendation.
The project will begin with data that is already public. This gives the team a safe foundation for developing, testing, and evaluating the system.
The experts remain in charge of every decision that matters. The difference is that they can spend their time on the documents that genuinely need their judgment.
Where Valency comes in
Most document systems were built to store files and help people find them. They were not built for AI agents that need to read, reason across, and act on huge collections of documents alongside human experts.
We think of this as research intelligence: turning vast scientific collections into evidence that people and AI agents can reason over together.
That is the system Valency has been building. For HERALD, it means supporting hundreds of millions of scientific documents, many AI agents working at once, and a large group of human reviewers, all inside the tight security boundaries this work demands. Valency also speaks the Model Context Protocol natively, giving HERALD’s agents a direct, structured way to work with the archive.
HERALD is the first real-world use of this infrastructure. We could not have asked for a more meaningful place to start.
The archives are not going to read themselves, and they are only the beginning. If helping solve big scientific problems at very large scale sounds like your kind of fun, we are hiring!. Or just say hello 👋 team@valency.io.
