Twilio co-founder’s fusion power startup raises $450M from Bessemer and Alphabet’s GV

Source: TechCrunch

Inertia Enterprises has raised $450 million to build one of the world’s most powerful lasers, which it hopes will serve as the foundation of a grid‑scale power plant slated for construction in 2030.

Inertia Enterprises is building on technology developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF). The NIF is the site of the world’s only controlled fusion reactions that have reached scientific breakeven, where the reaction releases more energy than it took to start — see the TechCrunch report.

Funding round

• Series A lead: Bessemer Venture Partners
• Participating investors: GV, Modern Capital, Threshold Ventures, and others

Co‑founders

• Jeff Lawson – co‑founder and former CEO of Twilio
• Annie Kircher – led the successful NIF experiments and remains at Lawrence Livermore
• Mike Dunne – Stanford professor who helped develop a power‑plant design based on NIF

Fusion approach

Inertia’s reactor uses inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In this method, lasers bombard a fuel target, compressing it until the atoms fuse and release energy. The technique follows NIF’s design, where laser light is converted into X‑rays inside the target; the X‑rays then heat and compress the fuel pellet.

Key technical target

• Deliver 10 kJ of laser energy ten times per second.

Scale and cost

• Each power plant will require 1,000 lasers firing at 4.5 mm targets that cost < $1 each to mass‑produce.
• By contrast, NIF uses 192 lasers on meticulously crafted targets that take dozens of hours to make — see the LLNL target description.

Inertia believes that applying a commercial mindset to the same basic principles can dramatically lower costs.

Fusion startup funding landscape

Fusion startups have collectively attracted over $10 billion in recent months. At least a dozen companies have raised more than $100 million each — see the TechCrunch list.

Recent notable rounds

• Avalanche – $29 M to advance a desktop‑sized fusion reactor (source).
• Type One Energy – $87 M in advance of a $250 M Series B (source).
• Commonwealth Fusion Systems – $863 M from investors including Google, Nvidia, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures (source).

Recent IPO announcements

• General Fusion – announced a reverse merger with acquisition company Spring Valley III, valuing the combined entity at $1 billion (source).
• TAE Technologies – disclosed a merger with Donald Trump’s social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, in an all‑stock transaction valuing the combined company at $6 billion (source).