Team

The plant and the molecule.

Reflux is built by two founders who split the problem down the middle. One has designed and run the processes our customers run. The other builds the chemistry models that predict them.

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Two founders One of us reads the plant. The other reads the molecule.

Most teams building for this industry have one half of that.

Who builds Reflux.

Nathan Ruberto
Co-founder & CEO Nathan Ruberto

A chemical engineer who has already done the job Reflux automates. Nathan did powertrain performance simulation in MATLAB and Simulink at Tesla in Palo Alto, then product launch engineering on the Model Y refresh in Fremont. Before that, project engineering in nuclear fuel manufacturing at Cameco, pulp and paper at Resolute, and chemical production at ERCO. At Waterloo he led a simulation-based design team on propulsion controls and modelling. Before Reflux trusted a single assumption about how an engineer's day actually works, he interviewed more than three hundred of them one on one.

  • Chemical engineering, Waterloo
  • Tesla
  • Cameco
  • NEXT 36
Jonathan Bell
Co-founder & CTO Jonathan Bell

A chemist who went into machine learning. Jonathan read chemistry as an undergraduate, then AI and machine learning at University College London, where his thesis is an electron-conserving retrosynthesis model. Before that, several years of AI-in-chemistry research at Yale School of Medicine, including a photosensitizer prediction model for cancer therapy that was confirmed by in-lab compound testing, so his models get checked against reality. At Reflux he built the orchestration layer that lets one prompt drive separate applications end to end.

  • Chemistry undergraduate
  • AI and machine learning, UCL
  • Yale School of Medicine
  • Orchestration layer

How the work splits.

Domain The plant side

The workflows in the product are ones Nathan ran by hand first, in nuclear, pulp and paper, chemicals, and automotive.

Models The molecule side

Jonathan builds the chemistry models and the layer that drives real software. His research gets checked against lab results, not benchmarks.

Overlap Both of us read the output

Neither of us has to take the other's word for whether a result is right. That is the review step we are building into the product.

Small team. Real plants. Open roles.

If you build software for engineers, we would like to hear from you. If you run simulations for a living, we would like to hear from you more.

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