Founded by several of the world’s leading stellarator experts, Type One Energy also brings concentrated experience from renowned fusion science institutions, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S., the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for its work on advanced magnet technology.
This technical leadership team includes Chief Technology Officer Dr. Thomas Sunn Pedersen, Chief Science Officer Dr. John Canik, Chief Engineer Dr. David Anderson, and Head of Stellarator Plasma Science Dr. Chris Hegna.
Previously, Mowry held the CEO position at General Fusion, where he scaled up the company and raised over $200M in private investment and government support from three countries.
Bill Gate's Breakthrough Energy Ventures is involved in the funding.
It is crazy how much is happening with fusion lately. Years of barely anything moving, too little funding and too little progress. And now, we have dozens of startups, many with good funding and so much progress is being made on so many fronts. I am really happy about that, but can be a bit overwhelming and hard to keep up with.
"Bill Gates-backed Type One Energy lands massive seed extension to commercialize fusion power"
Ever since a government experiment proved in 2022 that fusion isn’t as far-fetched as it once seemed, physicists, engineers, and investors have been growing increasingly bullish on the technology’s ability to deliver on its long-held — if frequently delayed — promise of providing nearly limitless amounts of emission-free power.
The latest exhibit of that exuberance is Type One Energy, which today announced a fresh $53.5 million in funding.
Type One, for example, now has access to Summit, an exascale supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with which the startup has a partnership. Summit can perform 250 million times more calculations per second than supercomputers could back in the early 1980s, when Wendelstein 7-X was first being designed.
Next year, the startup wants to finalize the core reactor design. Then it’ll start building a prototype reactor called Infinity One, which will happen in tandem with the design process for a pilot reactor. Once the pilot design is finalized, which Type One hopes will happen in 2030