Founder & CEO, Nautilus · Former Group CEO, Pleuger Industries
Anton Schneerson is the founder and CEO of Nautilus, an industrial technology company, and the former Group CEO of Pleuger Industries. He was also Managing Director of Flacks Group from 2018 to 2025.
Schneerson repositioned Pleuger from a traditional submersible-pump manufacturer into a renewable-energy systems and technology business — the strategic shift that made a German Mittelstand engineering company a credible partner in a U.S. federally-funded programme. Under his leadership the company recorded approximately 20% profitability in 2023, its strongest margin in over fifteen years. He built a dedicated renewables push, appointing a Chief Commercial Officer in 2023; over the same period Pleuger delivered the cooling and seawater-lift pump systems for HVDC converter platforms across the BorWin Alpha–6 series, East Anglia 3, and Sunrise Wind.
The collaboration was deliberately transatlantic. In February 2024, Pleuger acquired AVI International, giving the German company a U.S. manufacturing and service base in Connecticut. On the German tranche, Pleuger is the named co-grantee — alongside Fraunhofer IEE — on the €3.4 million BMWK funding (Förderkennzeichen 03EI4047A). On the U.S. side, partner Sperra leads the 3D-printed concrete sphere under its US$4 million Department of Energy award.
For precision: Schneerson led Pleuger into the consortium that secured the funding — the grants are institutional, and the StEnSea concept was conceived in 2011 by Prof. Horst Schmidt-Böcking and Dr. Gerhard Luther.
Schneerson founded Nautilus in 2025. It brings physical AI into proven industrial businesses across the West and runs them for the long term. Nautilus is based in San Francisco and London. It is a member of NVIDIA Inception.
No. He was Group CEO of Pleuger Industries from July 2022 to February 2025. He founded Nautilus in 2025.
StEnSea (Stored Energy in the Sea) is a subsea pumped-hydro energy storage programme backed by US$7.7 million from the U.S. Department of Energy and the German BMWK. Pleuger Industries is a named co-grantee and supplies the Pump-as-Turbine technology.