A message from the founders
We’re the first company taking fusion energy from the lab to the electric grid at an industrial scale using proven physics. We’re building power plants based on the only experiment that successfully recreated the burning plasma of the sun, bringing nearly limitless energy to Earth.
Today, we’re announcing the next milestone in this journey: a $450M investment from some of the leading visionaries and investors in the world.
What is fusion?
Fusion is the holy grail of energy. The fundamental source of energy in the universe, it’s what powers the sun and all the stars. And if we could bottle star power, we would create clean, safe, abundant, and affordable energy.
It’s a goal that has inspired scientific discovery for decades. Over the years, scientists have developed many theoretical ways to achieve the reaction at the heart of fusion. Governments have spent billions of dollars to construct hundreds of fusion machines. But conceptual equations couldn’t predict the real complexities of actual high-energy plasmas. While many of these experiments eventually generated fusion energy, they always required more energy than they were able to produce…
That is, until December 2022, when scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) finally succeeded in bottling the star power, unleashing more energy than they imparted on the experiment.
These researchers made history by shooting the world’s largest laser at a target containing a tiny, peppercorn-sized capsule of fusion fuel. The laser energy imploded the fuel, raising its temperature to hundreds of millions of degrees, and spawning the world’s first and only approach to achieve a self-sustaining fusion plasma. Since then, the experiment has been repeated many times, and the energy output has increased multi-fold. It is one of the great breakthroughs of modern science.
But this experiment was designed for research, not commercial-scale power plants. The lab runs these types of experiments every other month or so, with hand-crafted bespoke fusion targets and a wildly inefficient laser. A power plant needs to run all the time, with mass-produced fuel targets, and a laser system that can fire more efficiently, more powerfully, and at speeds measured in hertz, not days.
It’s time we turn the lab’s prototype into a production line.
To achieve that scale, we must industrialize—from building factories to automating processes to developing quality controls. Luckily, industrialization is something we have a blueprint for. It’ll take time, money, and talent. But unlike basic science, it’s a matter of when, not if. Just ask the technology companies that do it annually to ship a new phone.
How we’re building
At Inertia, we’re combining two knowns—known physics and known pathways to commercial-scale—to make fusion energy a reality.
We’re standing on decades of research and billions of dollars so that we can focus on scaling up in the most direct way possible. That’s why we can confidently say…
We are the commercial fusion energy company.
Our plan is ambitious but simple:
1. Start with proven physics.
Above all else, we believe that a private company should focus on commercializing the technology, not proving the basic science. The results proven by NIF speak for themselves. However, it’s easy to inadvertently make scale-up decisions that might lead you outside the zone of the known physics regime. We embrace engineering and financial challenges, but steer clear of unnecessary scientific risk. And when we do introduce changes, we rely on models, techniques, and experience validated by years of experiments and research.
2. Build the world’s most powerful laser.
The laser that will power our plant will be the most powerful laser in the world (in terms of average power). It will be made from billions of laser diodes. It will be a million times more powerful than NIF, 20 times more efficient, and 1/10th the physical footprint. Our laser will consist of thousands of smaller beams, all converging on the target simultaneously. These beamlines are the key to our scale-up of this technology: we will manufacture these laser units in a factory, fit them into the form factor of a shipping container, and treat them as modular, replaceable components in our system. By choosing a large number of modular beams instead of a small number of monolithic beams, we get incredible flexibility for plant operations and configuration. During our manufacturing pre-production phase over the next several years, we are constructing the prototype beamline in our facility in Livermore, CA.
3. Build the world’s first fusion fuel target factory.
In today’s big science experiments, fusion fuel targets are hand-made, each one to unique specifications. These are prototypes which scientists test in the lab. However, like any product, once a prototype works, you scale up production in a factory. You employ larger batch sizes, automation, and amortize the cost over a very large number of units—trading manufacturing fidelity and speed of delivery within allowable tolerances. That’s exactly what Inertia is doing at our facility in Livermore, CA. During our manufacturing pre-production phase over the next several years, we are building the world’s first assembly line for fusion targets. We are developing the key processes for each component of the target, as well as the assembly, fueling, and injection steps needed for fully scaled, low-cost production.
4. Build the gigawatt, utility-scale fusion power plant.
As we develop our mass-produced laser units and targets, we are simultaneously developing an integrated and fully consistent power plant design. We are leveraging years and nearly a hundred million dollars spent to research and validate the fusion power plant design with plant operators. So after completing prototypes of both our manufacturable unit laser and our fuel target production line, we will scale up both of these into a gigawatt, utility-scale fusion power plant during the 2030s. This plant will harness the fusion energy produced by our 10 MJ laser operating at 10 Hz, turning heat into steam, which then drives a turbine (just like thousands of power plants operating today). The inputs to our fusion plant are water and about a dozen EVs’ worth of lithium per year, and its only emissions are helium. It breeds its own fuel, and all other components are continually recycled. This first-of-a-kind plant will not be optimized for cost, but will demonstrate the full end-to-end energy generation capability and set the stage for the lower-cost commercial facilities to follow.
Who We Are
We are builders, and we are building big. As a founding team, we’re combining a uniquely qualifying mix of national laboratory, academic, and business expertise. Together, we are building a company of interdisciplinary DO-ers.
Inertia’s is a culture committed to building and learning quickly. Our senior leaders bring experience from software, hardware, consumer electronics, semiconductors, manufacturing, national labs and academia to tackle the challenges of commercialization with urgency.
We also know that this is not an undertaking any one company can accomplish alone. So as we build our team, we are also creating a sophisticated ecosystem of investors, vendor partners, national labs, universities, and government stakeholders. We’re also compiling decades of subject matter expertise in relevant fields for our science and technology board. We believe that there is brilliance in all of these communities, and our job is to become the hub of coordination to truly unleash the multi-industry undertaking necessary to achieve one of humanity’s loftiest goals.
Recent progress in the field of fusion has been astonishing. From the ignition breakthrough at NIF, to the many investors who have now bet on this mission—the energy in this field is contagious. And we’re excited to be a meaningful part of it.
To date, there have been scaled bets on fusion companies building tokamaks, pulsed power, and FRCs. But no scaled bets on laser-driven IFE. With today’s investment in Inertia, that changes. With the backing of our investors, Inertia is adding laser-driven IFE to the list of big bets on the future of fusion energy. We are laser-focused (pun intended) on executing our plan.
Achieving commercial fusion energy, while within reach for the first time ever, will not be easy. As the founders of Inertia, we invite you to join us—as a cheerleader, an employee, a vendor, an investor, or even a critic—as we embark on our mission to create star power for life.
Onward!
Jeff, Mike, and Annie