US fusion start-up Xcimer Energy has raised $100 million in Series A financing led by Hedosophia, with participation from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Prelude Ventures, Emerson Collective, Gigascale Capital and Starlight Ventures. Xcimer says it will use this financing to establish a new facility in Denver, where it will build a prototype laser system including the world’s largest non-linear optical pulse compression system to advance the development of its technology for laser-driven inertial fusion.
“This Series A financing enables us to achieve key milestones along the path to commercial inertial fusion energy,” said Conner Galloway, CEO and Chief Science Officer of Xcimer. “We’re thrilled that our industry-leading investors, as well as our partners from US national labs, academic institutions and private industry, are joining us on our mission to bring safe, reliable, zero-carbon and economical energy to the world.”
The technical feasibility of inertial fusion was established by the US government decades ago. In 2022, fusion ignition and scientific breakeven was achieved for the first time by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with fuel capsules on the NIF now producing up to 2.5 times more fusion energy than the laser energy delivered to ignite the fuel.
Xcimer is building upon laser technologies originally pursued for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) defence programmes of the 1980s to enable much higher laser energies, which in turn enables scaling the fusion performance achieved on NIF to much higher gain – as well as other key simplifications to the design of a laser fusion power plant.
Xcimer aims to expand the proven science of inertial fusion to industrial scale by developing the world’s highest-energy laser system and combining it with key technologies and innovations from multiple fields. Xcimer says its laser architecture will produce up to 10 times higher laser energy at 10 times higher efficiency and over 30 times lower cost per joule than the NIF laser system that achieved fusion scientific break-even in December 2022.
The funding also equips Xcimer to expand its technical team in Denver, where it recently moved the majority of employees. The company has hired a Senior Vice President of Engineering, Giovanni Greco, who brings decades of experience leading teams developing complex aerospace systems at Blue Origin and Astra Space. Greco will lead engineering at Xcimer, starting with the design, development and manufacturing of the prototype laser system to be constructed in Denver.
“The benefits of fusion for humanity have never been more clear or more necessary,” said Mark Cupta, managing partner at Prelude Ventures and Xcimer board member. “Xcimer has developed a game-changing approach to inertial fusion and assembled a team of the brightest minds in the industry to execute on it. I’m confident that with Xcimer leading us on this path, the world will see this transformative source of energy finally deployed at commercial scale.”
In 2023, Xcimer was selected for a $9 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, a highly competitive public-private partnership program designed to expedite the path towards putting fusion energy on the power grid. The DOE is also creating three inertial fusion energy hubs in the Inertial Fusion Energy Science & Technology Accelerated Research (IFE-STAR) initiative, consisting of public and private organisations and government research labs. Xcimer is a member of all three hubs.
