This Entrepreneur Brought Smartphones to Hospitals. Now He's Bringing AI to Nuclear Plants

When Trey Lauderdale moved to San Luis Obispo, California three years ago, he found himself living in the shadow of Diablo Canyon, the state's last operational nuclear power plant. As conversations with local plant employees became routine, the Industrial Engineer from the University of Florida began to see striking parallels between his past and a potential future.

Fifteen years earlier, around 2008, Trey had founded Volt, a company with what many considered a "crazy" idea: putting phones in the hands of doctors and nurses for critical hospital communication. At the time, Blackberry ruled the enterprise world, and the notion of using consumer smartphones for accessing electronic medical records, video calls, and emergency alerts seemed far-fetched.

But Trey understood something about risk-averse industries. Hospitals, like nuclear plants, operate under a "do no harm" philosophy. Both require extreme security measures whether protecting patient data under HIPAA or ensuring cyber security in nuclear facilities. Both prefer on-premise solutions over cloud-based systems. And both demand that new technology prove itself incrementally.

In 2019, when Volt was sold, it had become the standard for smartphone-based clinical communication across leading health systems nationwide.