Seattle startup Avalanche Energy on Tuesday announced $29 million in funding to support its push toward fusion power and to help launch a commercial-scale testing facility for fusion technologies.
The private investment was led by RA Capital Management and brings the startup’s total funding to $105 million across investors and government grants.
The new capital is largely earmarked for FusionWERX, a test facility in Richland, Wash., that is a public-private partnership offering shared R&D resources to companies, government labs and universities to develop the sector’s supply chain and to produce radioactive materials. The site is expected to open next year and is supported by $10 million in matching funds provided by Washington state.
The recent investment will also help pay for equipment including superconducting magnets that will be needed for Avalanche’s next-generation compact fusion device.
The fusion sector has attracted massive investments in recent years as energy-hungry data centers expand nationally to meet burgeoning AI needs. Avalanche is targeting slightly different use cases, but still benefiting from the insatiable appetite for clean power.
The round included all of the startup’s existing backers: Congruent Ventures, Founders Fund, Lowercarbon Capital and Toyota Ventures. New investors 8090 Industries, Overlay Capital and others also joined.
An outlier in the fusion race
Avalanche remains an outlier in the Pacific Northwest’s fusion ecosystem. While local rivals Helion Energy, Zap Energy and General Fusion are aiming for large devices to feed electrons to the electrical grid, Avalanche is going small.
The company has its sights on desktop-sized machines well-suited for space or defense applications — environments where portability and power density are more critical than sheer grid-scale output.
Avalanche founders Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan have likewise taken a less conventional path to founding the company, coming not from physics labs in academia but from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin where they worked on rocket propulsion.
Their iterative, builder-focused approach has led them to unlikely sources of inspiration — most recently, decades-old research from Russia’s Mir space program that helped them reorient some misbehaving plasma.
“There’s a little bit of archeology going on, digging up old Soviet papers from the ’80s that are not necessarily well digitized,” said Langtry, the company’s CEO. But the overlooked discoveries by the Russians can be successfully applied to Avalanche’s fusion devices, he said. “We ended up borrowing some of their ideas.”
Progress in pursuit of fusion
Since launching in 2018, the team has grown to 50 employees and notched recent advances:
- Taming plasma: Avalanche overcame two critical technical challenges around creating stable, clean plasma — which is a fourth state of matter in addition to solid, liquid and gas that’s key to generating fusion energy.
- High-voltage stability: The team operated its fusion device at 300,000 volts, a new record for compact, magneto-electrostatic fusion technology.
- The prototypes: The startup is currently working with two compact fusion prototypes: Jyn and the slightly larger Lando, named after Star Wars’ protagonists Jyn Erso and Lando Calrissian.
The team hopes its next fusion machine will hit the sought-after target of “Q greater than one” — which is when more energy is produced by the plasma than was put into it.
Though Avalanche is charting its own course, it’s part of a global race to harness the energy created when small atoms are forced to collide and fuse — mimicking the reactions that power the sun. Physicists have spent decades trying to develop commercially viable fusion. None so far have succeeded, but some companies claim they’re getting close.
“The time where you could kind of get by with paper designs and plans is sort of ending. It’s really all about who can build these machines in the next couple years and really demonstrate record-breaking plasmas and then commercialize that,” Langtry said, adding, “we’re going to be right there with them.”
