One of six fusion companies collaborating with ORNL secures funding from Khosla Ventures
Realta Fusion Inc. secures $12 million in total. It is part of a growing cluster of start-ups coming out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Realta Fusion Inc. just received $3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and is one of the six recipients of the funding that is working with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to advance designs and R&D for fusion power plants (see teknovation.biz article here).
Now comes word via Wisconsin Inno that Realta Fusion Inc. has received an additional $9 million in funding from legendary venture capital firm Khosla Ventures of Menlo Park, CA. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation is also an investor, and the DOE funding was $3 million.
The company was spun out of research conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) and is part of a growing cluster fusion energy hub in the state. An older company named SHINE Technologies LLC which is also a spinout from UW-Madison has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to advance its fusion goals. That company, known as SHINE Medical Technologies when a representative spoke at the 2022 “Nuclear Opportunities Workshop” hosted by the East Tennessee Economic Council, has a four-phase business plan of which radioisotope production and fusion energy are two parts.
Realta Fusion was formally incorporated in the fall of 2022 with the goal of commercializing the technology that was initially funded through a $10 million DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy award.
