Inertia Enterprises, a private fusion power start-up, announced today the formation of the company, co-founded by fusion energy pioneer Dr. Andrea “Annie” Kritcher, fusion power plant designer Prof. Mike Dunne, and successful tech entrepreneur, Jeff Lawson. Equipped with world-class expertise spanning science, engineering, technology and business, Inertia is commercializing the only approach to fusion that has successfully achieved ignition and energy gain – demonstrated at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
Inertia’s strategy is to take the most direct, scientifically proven path from what is working today at LLNL to commercial energy. The company is developing a new generation of mass-produced, low-cost lasers and fuel targets that leverage the groundbreaking scientific result of fusion ignition. The company has partnered with LLNL on a substantial and multifaceted relationship, including research agreements, to advance low-cost, mass-production target design and fabrication. The company has licensed nearly 200 patents covering multiple technologies critical to achieve fusion ignition, and has reached a first-of-its-kind arrangement to advance public-private collaboration and technology transfer, allowing Dr. Kritcher to be a co-founder of Inertia.
“The goal of delivering limitless fusion energy has attracted tens of billions of dollars in government investment and decades of research, culminating in the achievement of ignition just a couple of years ago,” said Jeff Lawson, Inertia founder and CEO. “Standing on the shoulders of giants, we see a clear path from big science to commercial energy by scaling up the industrial base to the scale needed for laser inertial fusion.”
In December 2022, Dr. Kritcher made history with the team at LLNL by conducting the first controlled fusion experiment to achieve fusion ignition, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it. This unprecedented achievement laid the foundation for Inertia to bring fusion to commercial scale.
Inertia Enterprises is founded by three proven innovators in their respective domains. Dr. Kritcher has been the lead designer of these LLNL experiments since 2019, responsible for the physics design that successfully achieved ignition. Jeff Lawson was the founder and CEO of tech platform Twilio, which he grew from inception to over $4B in revenue, a public listing on the New York Stock Exchange, and a global footprint of over 300,000 customers. Dr. Mike Dunne is a professor of Photon Science at Stanford University and an Associate Lab Director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where he leads a preeminent, multi-billion-dollar research facility using high power lasers that hit targets at kHz rates.
Previously, Dunne led the five-year program at LLNL to deliver an industry-validated power plant design based on the LLNL ignition approach, assembling a team of over seventy vendors, utility companies, national labs and universities.
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