Type One Energy, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based startup founded in 2019 to build fusion power plants, announced Tuesday morning that it has raised $200 million from investors.
The funding helps the startup move up the ranks of the top-funded fusion power companies. But fusion is a costly field to work in. It sits at the cutting edge of plasma physics, materials science, and advanced computation, and even $200 million doesn’t always go far.
Even so the new Series B should get the company halfway to paying for a 400-megawatt commercial power plant, Type One CEO Christofer Mowry told TechCrunch. If Type One can bring it online by 2034, he added, the company could complete its first power plant using less capital than many of its competitors, even with one or more subsequent rounds of funding.
The secret, Mowry said, is Type One’s business model. The company will design the power plant and many of its components, then turn to “bespoke” network of suppliers chosen for the project to build them, he said. Most fusion startups rely on suppliers for some components, but Type One plans to go further.
That approach keeps costs down. “The amount of capital that we need to raise to commercialize fusion at Type One is just a different order of magnitude than if you were going to be vertically integrated,” Mowry said, referring to companies that make most of their own parts in-house.
” he added. “I used to run a big nuclear manufacturing company.
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