Google DeepMind Alumni Are Building Tools to Accelerate Fusion Power for the Grid

Fusionality, building integrated operations technology for fusion devices, led by Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli, has raised a $3.7 million (CHF 3 million) pre-seed round from Founderful and Playfair.

Sometimes the right startup idea takes years to find. For Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli, it emerged from years of solving the same problem for fusion companies.

Fusion developers repeatedly told them they wanted to buy components for their control systems, but few suppliers understood the specific needs of fusion. Having spent years developing control technologies for experimental fusion devices, the founders saw an opportunity to turn that expertise into a company.

Fusionality is emerging alongside a growing fusion supply chain, with companies developing reactor components, precision hardware, and systems needed to turn fusion breakthroughs into commercial power. But few specialize in the hardware and software that control fusion reactors.

Fusionality’s founders argue that roughly 80% of control systems are common across fusion companies, despite many developers building them from scratch. The company aims to standardize that layer with control systems and simulation environments that can be adapted to individual reactor designs.

Fusion reactors require split-second control of superheated plasma, including its temperature, shape, and fuel levels. By building on the common physics across reactor designs, Fusionality aims to reduce the complexity and development time of these systems.

Felici and Buchli met while teaching AI to control an experimental tokamak, a donut-shaped device used to study fusion. Felici was then at EPFL in Switzerland, while Buchli worked at Google DeepMind. Felici later joined DeepMind, where he developed simulations and machine-learning interfaces for fusion devices.

Felici said AI will “play an important role in future control systems,” but that it’s not quite ready to tackle the entire challenge. “I wouldn’t be somebody who advocates for AI to take the role of controlling the entire fusion reactor,” he said. Today, AI is more likely to “complement or enhance or optimize” parts of the system, he added.

For now, Fusionality is focused on magnetic confinement, which uses powerful electromagnets to contain and heat fusion fuel. Startups including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Realta Fusion, Proxima Fusion, and Type One Energy are pursuing this approach. Fusionality plans to eventually develop control systems for other fusion technologies as well.

Fusionality’s pre-seed funding will help the team, currently seven strong, develop a “tightly selected number of technologies,” Felici said, though he declined to specify which. He likened them to 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.”

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