Pacific Fusion, a fusion development company based in Fremont, CA, previous unknown operating in “stealth mode,” rocketed to the forefront of attention in the fusion industry startup scene this week by scoring $900 million in Series A funding from an “A List” of 10 high tech investors.
The firm has secured more than $900 million in investor commitments. Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst led the round. Alongside General Catalyst, a mix of institutional VCs and individual company builders have participated in the funding round.
Investors include Andrew Forrest, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Elad Gil, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Ken Griffin, Lachy Groom, Leitmotif, Lightspeed, Lowercarbon Capital, Mustafa Suleyman, Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, Richard Merkin, and Trousdale Ventures. Hemant Taneja, Eric Schmidt, and Patrick Collison joined the firm’s Board of Directors.
The company said in a blog post its funding will come in stages, based on the company meeting certain milestones. The firm did not state what the milestones would be. However, a short list of topical areas where the company is likely to set them milestones include; fuel, materials, plasma temperature, modeling of the system, and safety, among others. Funding will be unlocked in stages as the company meets its pre-defined milestones.
The firm’s immediate goal is net facility gain. The funding will be used to to build a high-gain pulsed magnetic fusion driver to achieve ‘net facility gain’ (more fusion energy output than all stored energy input).
The investor team, led by General Catalyst, designed structure of the financing to avoid the risks of piecemeal funding that “misaligns investors and management teams.” In a post on its website the firm added that in its experience companies fail due to the distractions of having to raise capital in stages which leads to constraints in progress towards having a design, a commercial product, and going to market.
For this reason, the designation of the entire commitment from investors as a “Series A” stage is a bit of a misnomer as it incorporates, virtually in this approach, the normal expectations for a future Series B, C, etc.
Technical Approach
Pacific Fusion says its technology builds on proven inertial fusion concepts demonstrated at US National Laboratories to provide an affordable, practical, and scalable fusion system. Its modular pulser allows the firm optimize for a wide range of target designs, suitable for low-cost power and heat at different scales.
The firm states on its website that it is pursuing a pulsed magnetic path to inertial fusion — that is, using fast-rising, high-current pulses to magnetically squeeze and heat small containers of deuterium-tritium fuel, driving the fuel to fusion conditions.
The firm said it is building a fast pulser, similar to Sandia’s well-proven Z Machine. According to the company, pulser is made efficient and compact due to advances in pulsed power engineering. In 2022, LLNL first demonstrated its fusion technology opening a way to reliably achieve inertial fusion conditions.
Simultaneous arrival, which is the switching of pulser modules, can be programmed to allow the pulses to arrive at the target simultaneously, enabling high-pressure, short compressions. The result is that hydrogen is transformed into helium, releasing enormous amounts of heat, and this is the same process that powers the Sun.
The firm says it plans to offer a low cost fusion device that will be competitive on a global basis. The firm’s design approach is to build small mass-manufacturable units called bricks (two capacitors and a switch), which are assembled into modules that fit into shipping containers. The fusion chamber is being designed to be compact and cylindrical, facilitating low-cost maintenance built from widely available materials.
Profile of the Management Team
Leading the launch of Pacific Fusion is Eric Lander who has a distinguished background in an entirely different scientific field. He is a molecular biologist and mathematician. Previously, he led the International Genome Project and was the founding director of a high profile joint Harvard / MIT biomedical and genomic research center. He won a MacArthur “genius” grant. Separately, he served in the Biden White House as the Chief Science Adviser.
The President and CEO of Pacific Fusion is Will Reagan. At Alphabet, the parent company of Google, he worked on advanced science and R&D efforts. He served as a fellow at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E). He holds a PH.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley.
The Chief Technology Officer at Pacific Fusion is Keith Le Chien who has experience at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration where he was the Director of Inertial Confinement Fusion. He hold a Ph.D. in electrodynamics, pulsed power science, from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
The firm is hiring and has so far added 44 people to its team. All positions are listed as being on-site in Fremont, CA, which is about 20 miles north of San Jose, CA, on the east side of the San Francisco bay.
Fusion Industry Perspective
According to the Fusion Industry Association(FIA) more than 50 companies globally are working to commercialize fusion energy. Through July 2024 FIA records a total of more than $7 billion has been invested in these firms indicating the intense interest in the technologies to bring fusion energy to market.
According to FIA, and a recent report by the Bloomberg wire service, the two top firms in terms of success in attracting investors are Commonwealth Fusion Systems at $2 billion and TAE Technologies at about $1.2 billion. The $900 million commitment by Pacific Fusion’s investors would, for now, place the firm in third place in terms of total funding for fusion power development.
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