Our Investment in Pacific Fusion

Abundant clean energy through affordable fusion

For decades, fusion energy has been the ultimate scientific challenge—a tantalizing promise of clean, abundant power that has eluded researchers for over half a century. While numerous attempts have fallen short, recent scientific breakthroughs have transformed fusion from an impossible dream to a tractable set of engineering problems.

Pacific Fusion, founded in 2023 and based in Fremont, California, builds directly on the breakthrough ignition milestone that occurred at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in 2022. In particular, Pacific Fusion takes a pulsed magnetic approach - using electric currents to more efficiently create the physical conditions that delivered ignition on the NIF, and laying the foundation for a future powered by affordable fusion power. MCJ is proud to back Pacific Fusion in its Series A funding, led by General Catalyst, with participation from prominent investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Eric Schmidt, and Patrick Collison.

What is Pacific Fusion?

For many years, researchers have pursued different paths to fusion in parallel. Some built on relatively mature science but lacked a tractable path to low cost. Others had more tractable paths to low cost but lacked a strong scientific basis.

The story of Pacific Fusion begins in 2022, when a series of technical breakthroughs both demonstrated the conditions required for ignition and high gain and opened a clear path to building an affordable, deployable machine that can reach those conditions.

Instead of using lasers, Pacific Fusion employs fast-rising, high-current pulses to magnetically squeeze and heat a small fuel-filled metal cylinder, creating the extreme conditions necessary for fusion in a fraction of a second. This approach allows Pacific Fusion to build a machine that delivers 100-fold higher gain than has been demonstrated on the NIF - at less than 10% of the cost, driving a 1000x leap forward in practical performance without going beyond physical conditions already demonstrated.

Pacific Fusion’s Demonstration System

This approach is uniquely suited to affordable deployment at scale for a few reasons.

First, the system is far more efficient than lasers, and can be made from modular, mass-manufacturable components to keep capital costs low. Second, it avoids challenges to affordable operations and maintenance faced by magnetic confinement approaches, including loss of plasma stability and a breakdown of magnetic confinement.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Our investment in Pacific Fusion is more than a bet on a technology—it's a bet on human ingenuity. The caliber of the founding team cannot be overstated and is what foremost gives us strong conviction in the company’s future success.

Will Regan serves as President of Pacific Fusion. Will previously worked at ARPA-E co-developing the Accelerating Low-Cost Plasma Heating and Assembly (ALPHA) Program, where he gained an intimate understanding of the challenges and commercial viability of novel approaches to fusion. He then spent nearly eight years at Google’s moonshot division, X, where he founded the Mineral project and developed experience leading cross-functional teams working to achieve breakthrough engineering milestones.

Eric S. Lander serves as the Founding CEO of Pacific Fusion. Eric is a world-renowned scientist who has led major international projects (including the Human Genome Project), founded major scientific institutions (notably, the Broad Institute), founded companies, and advised the government. Eric is also a professor of biology at MIT and professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.

Keith LeChien, CTO, holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and pulsed power science. Keith has had an extraordinary career leading pulsed magnetic fusion at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and served as the Director of Inertial Confinement Fusion at the National Nuclear Security Administration. This unique background makes him one of the leading experts in pulsed magnetic fusion. Keith is also one of the inventors of the Impedance-Matched Marx Generator (IMG), a technology that underpins Pacific Fusion’s architecture.

Pacific Fusion’s Senior Founding Engineer, Leland Ellison, worked as a computational physicist and lead magnetohydrodynamics developer for the Ares multiphysics code at LLNL. He is applying that experience at Pacific Fusion, serving as the Simulation and Modeling Lead.

The company’s COO, Carrie von Muench, brings wide-ranging business experience, including industrials & public sector consulting at Boston Consulting Group and early-pipeline strategy at Google X. She most recently served as an investor at Innovation Endeavors, founded by Eric Schmidt.

The founding team has also recruited a number of key employees, including Nathan Meezan, who spent over 20 years at LLNL leading target design teams and is now Head of Target Design at Pacific Fusion, and Alex Zylstra, principal experimentalist responsible for achieving ignition on NIF, now Head of Experiments at Pacific Fusion.

Leveraging NIF’s Ignition Breakthrough

On December 5, 2022, NIF announced a watershed achievement in which scientists conducted an experiment using a method known as inertial confinement fusion (ICF). During this historic experiment, scientists used 192 lasers to fire 2.05 megajoules of energy onto a target containing a tiny diamond capsule (which contained deuterium and tritium), resulting in fusion ignition that released 3.15 megajoules of energy—the first demonstration of net target-level energy gain from a controlled fusion reaction.

Thanks to its team and collaborators, Pacific Fusion draws on insights from the NIF and is advancing the lab’s progress by integrating key technologies like the impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG) pulsed power system and pulsed magnetic fusion concepts such as MagLIF. Once it is able to achieve “net facility gain” — net energy output at the facility level — the company sees several opportunities to commercialize its technology in electrical power and industrial process heat markets.

As Pacific Fusion moves toward net facility gain, its pathway to commercialization opens doors across electricity generation and high-heat industrial applications. It’s a bold bet—but one we believe is well-timed and deeply strategic.

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