Focused Energy recently raised a $240 million Series A oversubscribed round, one of the largest early-stage rounds for a fusion energy startup.
The new round, announced last week, brings the company’s total private capital to $300 million, the company told TechCrunch. The startup has also received $200 million in grants, collectively making it one of the most heavily funded fusion startups.
based in Germany Focused Energy is developing a reactor that will use lasers to compress fusion fuel, an approach known as inertial confinement. The lasers fire at a fuel target, which compresses under attack to create conditions ripe for fusion. When the atoms in the fuel finally fuse, they release significant amounts of energy.
The company bases its design on the experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. This experiment is so far the first and only one to create a controlled nuclear fusion reaction that released more energy than it took to ignite it. The NIF connection is more than conceptual—Debbie Callahan, who helped design the fuel target at NIF, joined Focused Energy in December as its chief strategy officer.
At Focused Energy, Callahan is working to simplify the fuel target. The NIF target is complex and difficult to manufacture, and the facility only fires about 400 rounds per year. Focused Energy, on the other hand, would need to fire 10 shots per second, or about 864,000 shots per day.
A simplification involves removing the hohlraum, a precision-made gold cylinder that converts the laser energy into X-rays. The X-rays do the work of compressing the fuel pellet in the NIF. Focused Energy’s laser system is what industry experts call “direct drive” — that is, the lasers compress the fuel pellet directly. This will help boost the reactor’s efficiency, making it easier to generate power.
Focused Energy hopes to build its first demonstration system, Lighthouse, on the site of a decommissioned nuclear fission plant in Germany that was operated by utility RWE.
RWE was the lead investor in the Series A, Focused Energy told TechCrunch. The round also included participation from the German Federal Agency for Groundbreaking Innovation (SPRIND), Prime Movers Lab and the European Innovation Council Fund.
As big as this Series A is, the fusion industry has been an investor favorite this year. Last week, Thea Energy raised $100 million to develop its pixel-inspired fusion reactor. In February, Inertia Enterprises raised a $450 million series round to develop its own reactor, which could be a close competitor to Focused Energy’s. And in January, Type One Energy told TechCrunch it had raised nearly $90 million toward a $250 million Series B.
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