Watch · ListenseattleSometimes founders search high and low for the right startup idea, while other times it comes to them. Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli are two of the lucky ones. Over and over again, they heard the same thing from fusion companies: “We would ideally buy many of the components to make our control system, but there isn’t really anybody providing them—and especially there isn’t anybody who speaks the language of fusion,” Felici told TechCrunch. For years, the two founders have worked to develop new ways to control experimental fusion devices. “We spent quite a lot of our time solving exactly the problems that our customers need to solve,” he said. “It felt like the right time.”
To capitalize on the opportunity, Felici and Buchli founded Lausanne-based Fusionality this year and quickly raised a $3.7 million (CHF 3 million) pre-seed round from Founderful and Playfair. Felici serves as the company’s CEO, Buchli its CTO. Fusionality is part of an emerging supply chain serving the burgeoning fusion power industry. While some startups, like Kyoto Fusioneering, develop components to help fusion startups turn engineering breakthroughs into electricity for the grid, few companies specialize in the hardware and software required to control fusion reactors themselves. “Across the industry, many companies make their own control systems from scratch,” Felici said. “But actually, 80% of each company’s control system is really exactly the same.”
Fusion power plants generate electricity by harnessing energy released when two atoms fuse, which is more likely to occur in a superheated plasma. However, plasmas are fickle, and maintaining the proper temperature, shape, and fuel level requires split-second decision-making. The control systems used to maintain these conditions are complex to develop and deploy, but much of the fundamental physics is consistent across reactor designs. Fusionality plans to build on this commonality to develop a suite of control systems and simulation environments that startups can fine-tune for their specific designs.
Felici and Buchli met while teaching AI to control an experimental tokamak—a donut-shaped device researchers use to study fusion power. Felici was working at EPFL in Switzerland, which houses one such tokamak, while Buchli was at Google DeepMind. Later, Felici moved to Google DeepMind, where he developed simulations and machine learning interfaces for fusion devices. Felici said AI will ‘play an important role in future control systems,’ but it’s not yet ready to control entire reactors. “I wouldn’t be somebody who advocates for AI to take the role of controlling the entire fusion reactor,” he said. “Today, AI is more likely to ‘complement or enhance or optimize’ parts of the system.”
Fusionality is focusing on magnetic confinement fusion, an approach using powerful electromagnets to keep fusion fuel dense and hot enough for power plants. Companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Realta Fusion, Proxima Fusion, and Type One Energy are developing magnetic confinement devices. Eventually, the company will expand to other fusion approaches. Fusionality’s pre-seed funding will help the team, currently seven strong, develop a “tightly selected number of technologies,” though Felici declined to specify which. He likened them to Lego blocks: “We start with a few of these blocks and then we build out more. We have the ambition to serve the really wide range of technology needed to operate a fusion reactor.”
Tim De Chant, a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch, contributed to this article. He has written for publications like Wired, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, and is a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from UC Berkeley and his BA in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.
Source: TechCrunch
