Founding team includes Twilio co-founder and ex-CEO Jeff Lawson, Fusion Target Designer Andrea Kritcher and Fusion Power Plant Designer Mike Dunne

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.

Inertia is best-positioned to transform the field by combining the proven science from LLNL with innovative technology, leveraging Dr. Kritcher’s specialized expertise in fuel-target design, Professor Dunne’s leadership in integrated fusion power plant development and multi-$B laser facility advancement, and Lawson’s two decades of start-up and business acumen—ensuring the partnerships and expertise needed to move this breakthrough toward commercialization.

“There’s a lot of excitement around various potential pathways to fusion right now, but only one approach has delivered energy gain. This result is a monumental step for limitless clean energy,” said Dr. Kritcher.

Fusion energy offers a technological breakthrough unseen in American history since modern inventions like the internet, telephone, or light bulb. Fusion energy is the process where two light atoms combine, or "fuse," to form a larger atom, releasing a massive amount of energy. This is the same process that powers the sun and other stars and can provide an unlimited source of safe, reliable energy with minimal waste and no emissions. Capable of operating at all times of the day and scaling up or down to meet demand, fusion technology can produce critical baseload power for the world’s increasing energy needs.

Fusion energy that uses DT fuel produces primarily helium, which unlike the fuels used for nuclear fission reactors or other sources of energy, is an inert gas and not harmful to people or the environment. Because fusion energy does not use materials like uranium or plutonium, it can be deployed all around the world. Inertia’s GW-scale power plant design will be big enough to power a city of over a million people. On an annual basis, it would use only water and lithium – needing less lithium than resides in a handful of electric vehicle batteries.

“We’re at a crucial tipping point. 2022 proved that controlled fusion ignition is possible, but current lasers, like the one at LLNL, which is the size of three football fields, are not suitable for commercialization,” said Professor Dunne. “But with modern laser technologies, we can combine the transformative results from Annie and the team with high-powered laser technology from the semiconductor industry to convert decades of research into a reality.”

About Inertia

Inertia is taking the most direct, scientifically proven path to commercializing fusion, leveraging the only successful achievement of fusion ignition, using a process that was pioneered at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). With groundbreaking innovation, transformative technology, and multi-year investment, Inertia is committed to commercializing fusion energy in the next decade.

To learn more about Inertia visit https://inertia.com

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