Hajra Naz
Sometimes founders search high and low for the right startup idea. Other times, the idea finds them. Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli belong to the second group.
They kept hearing the same message from fusion companies. Felici told: “We would ideally buy many of the components to make our control system, but there isn’t really anybody providing them — and especially there isn’t anybody who speaks the language of fusion.”
For years, the two founders worked on new ways to control experimental fusion devices. “We spent quite a lot of our time solving exactly the problems that our customers need to solve,” he said. “It felt like the right time.”
So they acted on it. Felici and Buchli founded Lausanne-based Fusionality this year. They quickly raised a $3.7 million (CHF 3 million) pre-seed round from Founderful and Playfair. Felici is CEO. Buchli is CTO.
Fusionality is part of a growing supply chain built around the fusion power industry. Some startups take a different angle. Kyoto Fusioneering, for example, builds components that help fusion startups turn engineering breakthroughs into grid electricity. Other companies are established manufacturers with the precision skills fusion hardware demands.
Still, few companies focus on the hardware and software that control the reactors themselves. “Across the industry, many companies make their own control systems from scratch,” Felici said. “But actually, 80% of each company’s control system is really exactly the same.”
Fusion power plants make electricity by fusing two atoms together. This happens more easily inside a superheated plasma. But plasmas are unpredictable. Keeping the right temperature, shape, and fuel level takes split-second decisions.
Building the control systems for this is hard. Deploying them is harder. Yet the underlying physics stays fairly consistent across reactor designs. Fusionality wants to use that shared foundation. Its plan: build a suite of control systems and simulation environments. Startups can then adjust these tools to match their own reactor design.
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Felici and Buchli first met while teaching AI to control an experimental tokamak. A tokamak is a donut-shaped device researchers use to study fusion power. At the time, Felici worked at EPFL in Switzerland, home to one such tokamak. Buchli worked at Google DeepMind. Felici later joined DeepMind too, where he built simulations and machine learning interfaces for fusion devices.
Felici believes AI will “play an important role in future control systems.” But he doesn’t think it’s ready for the whole job. “I wouldn’t be somebody who advocates for AI to take the role of controlling the entire fusion reactor,” he said. Right now, AI is better suited to “complement or enhance or optimize” specific parts of the system, he added.
For now, Fusionality is focused on magnetic confinement fusion. This approach uses powerful electromagnets to keep fusion fuel dense and hot enough to power a plant. Several startups are chasing this same design path, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Realta Fusion, Proxima Fusion, and Type One Energy. Felici said the company will eventually branch into other fusion approaches too.
Fusionality’s small team, currently seven people, will use the pre-seed funding to develop a “tightly selected number of technologies,” Felici said. He wouldn’t say which ones exactly. He compared the approach to building with Lego blocks. “We start with a few of these blocks and then we build out more,” he said. “We have the ambition to serve the really wide range of technology that you need to operate a fusion reactor.”
