Fusion energy startup Inertia Enterprises has secured $450 million to begin developing a power plant centered on creating the world’s most powerful lasers.
The Series A funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and also included Threshold Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, and GV (formerly Google Ventures).
Based in Livermore, California, United States, the company plans to start construction of its commercial power plant in 2030.
In addition, it aims to build a facility to manufacture the lasers and a production line to supply millions of tiny specialized pellets, which will be used to trigger fusion reactions.
The funding highlights increasing enthusiasm for fusion, which offers the potential for limitless clean energy but poses significant engineering and physics challenges.
Fusion power plants generally follow two main approaches. Commonwealth is among the leaders working to use powerful magnets to contain a superheated plasma.
Inertia, on the other hand, is taking a different route, using high-powered lasers to trigger fusion reactions—a method first validated during a 2022 breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“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,'” the company said in a statement shared with AM Business on Wednesday.
The company said it is building on decades of research and billions of dollars in investment to scale up in the most direct way possible.
“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,” the statement added.
