Soviet secrets and Star Wars prototypes: Avalanche raises $29M for its quest for desktop-sized power

Seattle-based Avalanche Energy on Tuesday announced a $29 million grant to support its push toward fusion power and help launch a commercial-scale testbed for fusion technology.

The private investment was led by RA Capital Management and brings the startup’s total funding to $105 million from investors and government grants.

The new capital is earmarked for FusionWERX, a research facility in Richland, Wash., that is a public-private partnership that provides shared R&D resources to companies, government labs and universities to improve the industry’s supply chain and manufacture radioactive materials. The site is expected to open next year and is supported by $10 million in matching funds provided by the state of Washington.

The latest investment will also help pay for equipment including super magnets that will be needed for Avalanche’s next-generation compact fusion device.

The colocation sector has attracted significant investment in recent years as power-hungry data centers spring up across the country to meet the growing demands of AI. Avalanche targets slightly different use cases, but still benefits from the insatiable desire for clean energy.

This round included all the backers of the program: Congruent Ventures, Founders Fund, Lowercarbon Capital and Toyota Ventures. New investors 8090 Industries, Overlay Capital and others have joined.

The best in the fusion race

Avalanche remains an outsider in the fusion ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest. While local rivals Helion Energy, Zap Energy and General Fusion are aiming for larger machines to feed electrons into the electric grid, Avalanche is moving slowly.

The company is looking for desktop-sized machines that are well-suited for space or security applications — areas where portability and power density are more important than grid-scale deployment.

Avalanche founders Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan also took an unusual approach to starting a company, coming not from university physics labs but from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin where they worked on rocket propulsion.

Their iterative, builder-centric approach has led them to unexpected sources of inspiration — most recently, decades of research from Russia’s Mir space program that helped them reprogram misbehaving plasma.

“There’s a bit of archeology going on, digging up old Soviet documents from the ’80s that haven’t been properly digitized,” said Langtry, the company’s chief executive. But the Russians’ overlooked discoveries could be effectively used in Avalanche’s fusion devices, he said. “We ended up borrowing some of their ideas.”

Progress in the pursuit of integration

Since its launch in 2018, the team has grown to 50 employees and realized the latest developments:

• Plasma reduction: Avalanche has overcome two key technological challenges in creating a stable, clean plasma – the fourth state of matter beyond solid, liquid and gas that is key to generating fusion energy.
• High-voltage durability: The team operated their fusion device at 300,000 volts, a new record for compact, magneto-electrostatic fusion technology.
• Prototypes: The startup is currently working on two compact fusion prototypes: the Jyn and the slightly larger Lando, named after Star Wars characters Jyn Erso and Lando Calrissian.

The team hopes its next fusion machine will achieve the sought-after target of “Q greater than one” – where more energy is produced by the plasma than is put into it.

Although the Avalanche is charting its course, it is part of a global race to harness the energy created when tiny atoms are forced to collide and collide – mimicking the reactions that power the sun. Physicists have spent decades trying to develop a commercially viable synthesis. None have succeeded so far, but some companies say they are getting close.

“The time when you can be successful with paper designs and blueprints is almost over. It’s really just about who can build these machines in the next few years and demonstrate record-breaking plasmas and sell that,” Langtry said, adding, “we’ll have them there.”