CASE STUDY

Scaling for the Nuclear Age: How Oklo Built a Public-Company Finance Foundation on NetSuite

July 29, 2026

Oklo is on a mission to make clean, affordable, reliable power accessible at commercial scale. The company designs, builds, owns, and operates advanced nuclear fission power facilities, combining a long-standing R&D track record with an increasingly operational business model. After more than a decade of development, Oklo completed a SPAC transaction and became a publicly traded company, rapidly accelerating its trajectory from research-stage startup to a capital-intensive enterprise with construction underway at Idaho National Laboratory.

With that growth came an urgent need to build the financial infrastructure to match. Richard Lindell, Director of Finance at Oklo, joined the company to lead accounting operations and financial reporting at a pivotal moment. His mandate was clear: get the company’s finance function to a place where it could support the scale, transparency, and compliance requirements of a public company while remaining agile enough to evolve alongside the business.

Challenge

Oklo’s finance function had been built for a different stage of the business. Accounting and advisory work had long been outsourced, and the systems in place reflected that reality. The company ran on QuickBooks, basic payroll software, and entry-level spend and expense tools, supported by a smaller local bank with no meaningful system integrations. The approach was, in Richard’s words, “bare minimum, what you need to get the accounting booked at the end of the month.”

Going public changed everything. As a newly listed company, Oklo faced immediate pressure to put a SOX and compliance backbone in place across its financial reporting processes, while simultaneously undergoing public company readiness audits. QuickBooks, which had been adequate for a pre-operational startup, was creating tangible friction: limitations around user access roles, permissions, and audit logs were generating manual reconciliation work and raising concerns from external auditors. The existing environment simply wasn’t built to support the controls, transparency, and scalability the business now required.

At the same time, Oklo’s internal accounting team was small. Taking on a major ERP implementation without disrupting day-to-day operations was a real constraint, and the team had a firm timeline: they needed to go live in the fourth quarter of 2024, just two to three months after going public. Finding the right platform and the right implementation partner was a decision Oklo took seriously, knowing it would shape the company’s accounting operations for the next five to ten years.

Solution

After evaluating 10 to 15 factors across four to five implementation partners, Oklo selected NetSuite as its ERP and Caravel as its implementation partner. The decision came down to two priorities: SOX integration depth and the advisory horsepower to navigate Oklo’s unique regulatory environment.

As a public company operating in the nuclear space, Oklo is subject to a complex web of compliance requirements spanning SEC reporting, SOX controls, DOE regulations, and defense security frameworks. Caravel and BPM under the same umbrella was a key differentiator. Having a full-service accounting and advisory firm in the background meant Caravel could speak to how implementation decisions would affect Oklo downstream, not just at go-live but across the full arc of the company’s growth.

The implementation itself was structured to reflect Oklo’s constraints. Phase one focused on the essentials: establishing NetSuite as a reliable compliance backbone that the team could grow into, rather than trying to deploy every capability at once. The Caravel team leaned in wherever Oklo’s small internal team needed support, including stepping in to help complete client-assigned deliverables when bandwidth ran short. The time-and-materials engagement model gave Oklo the flexibility to flex up when necessary without being locked into a rigid scope.

On the data migration side, Oklo made a deliberate choice to bring in eight quarters of quarterly summary data from QuickBooks rather than a full transaction-level history. As a smaller reporting company and emerging growth company, the two-year financial reporting requirement made quarterly summary data the right level of granularity. Historical transactions remained in QuickBooks for reference, while all net-new transaction data fed directly into NetSuite from day one of go-live. Oklo was live on October 1, 2024, on schedule and within a compressed implementation window.

For the integrations surrounding NetSuite, Richard drew on his prior experience at a public company to select tools he already knew played well within the NetSuite ecosystem, each with pre-built adapters that simplified deployment and reduced risk.

Outcome

Going live on NetSuite gave Oklo the compliance foundation it needed at exactly the right moment. The platform addressed several of the pain points that had created audit risk in the QuickBooks environment, bringing user access controls, role management, and audit logging into a centralized, auditable system. What had previously required significant manual reconciliation became a more natural part of day-to-day operations.

Beyond compliance, the team found meaningful improvements in how they work. Reporting became more robust and more user-friendly, with the ability to build customized workflows for journal entry preparation and review across the accounting team. Allocation functionality, which had been limited in QuickBooks, opened up new capabilities relevant to Oklo’s increasingly complex cost structure.

With that foundation in place, Oklo is now focused on expanding its NetSuite footprint in step with the business. Phase two priorities reflect the company’s rapid growth trajectory. On the commercial side, Oklo has announced multiple letters of intent and memoranda of understanding with prospective customers, making CRM implementation a near-term priority. On the operational side, as construction at Idaho National Laboratory progresses, the company is ramping up fixed asset management and cost accounting capabilities to track procurement spend expected to reach $70 to $80 million across construction and fuel costs. Quality assurance and corrective action tracking, a critical requirement in the nuclear industry, is also on the roadmap as NetSuite’s integration options in that space come into play.

Contact us