(Bloomberg) -- Pacific Fusion Corp., a power company that is attempting to create a nuclear fusion-based energy source, said it has raised over $900 million, putting the unknown startup near the top of a growing industry.
In a blog post Friday, the company said the Series A funding round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and an A-list group of individual investors, including Citadel founder Ken Griffin, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, venture capitalist John Doerr and Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft Corp.’s consumer AI business. General Catalyst’s Hemant Taneja, former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and Collison joined the company’s board of directors.
The investment, an unusually large sum for an initial funding round, reflects the outsized amount of capital required for developing fusion power, a highly experimental form of energy. No fusion power plants yet exist. It also highlights the intense interest in nuclear energy, driven in part by the massive power demands of artificial intelligence. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman has invested in fusion and fission. Meanwhile, the owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island, which uses fission, is restarting it in a deal with Microsoft.
More than four dozen companies around the world are seeking to commercialize fusion technology, and have received a total of about $7.1 billion in total funding through July, according to the most recent report from the Fusion Industry Association. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has attracted the most, about $2 billion, followed by TAE Technologies Inc. with $1.2 billion.
Pacific Fusion’s funding will come in stages, based on the company meeting certain milestones. It wasn’t clear from the blog post what those milestones would be. The multi-step financing structure is unusual in venture, although it was used on occasion during the clean tech energy boom in the mid-2000s. Biotech companies sometimes raise funds using this structure.
Fusion technology has enormous potential if the challenge of making the process affordable is met, the founders wrote in the blog post. “Fusion could be the ideal power source — emitting no CO2, requiring far less materials and land than other power sources, and offering billions of years of near-free, globally accessible fuel,” they wrote.
Pacific Fusion is based in Fremont, California and has been secretive about its work since its founding last year. The startup is developing a type of technology known as high-gain pulsed magnetic fusion.
Will Regan, the company’s president and co-founder, was formerly at Alphabet Inc.’s X, the search giant’s “moonshot factory” that undertakes far-out projects. At Alphabet, Regan worked on projects such as Mineral, an agriculture-technology business. Pacific Fusion’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Keith LeChien, previously worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The company is hiring for 16 positions, according to its website. It currently employs 44 people.
--With assistance from Will Wade.
(Updated with new details in second paragraph. An earlier version corrected the date of Pacific Fusion’s founding.)
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