Commercializing the only proven fusion science: our investment in Inertia

We’re incredibly excited to share that Uncork Capital participated in the Series A of Inertia Enterprises, which was just announced. Like many “frontier tech” investments we make, this one is a bit out of the ordinary: it’s a $450M tranched round and it’s to commercialize fusion energy technology.

I never know what my next investment in frontier tech is going to be: it could be Space Tech, Robotics, Additive Manufacturing, Quantum Computing, etc — we have indeed invested in all these sectors. So I would typically say: “we can invest in pretty much any out there technology as long as the founders are incredible and the market is massive, so besides asteroid mining and nuclear fusion, anything is fair game”. Well. I didn’t think I’d invest in nuclear fusion because of the typical capital requirements of the category — and we’re a Seed fund. That was until I caught up with my old friend, Jeff Lawson.

Jeff and I go way back: we met in 2008, when he was going around the Valley raising his seed round for Twilio. I really liked what he was doing, I was clear on the potential of API-driven businesses (doh) but his valuation ($5M) was too high for me and I couldn’t negotiate it down, so I passed. Like the dumbf… I am (sometimes). A few months later, I invested in Sendgrid, which eventually went public and then was acquired by Twilio. Jeff and I stayed in touch over the years, and I have said many times that not working with Jeff was one of the few regrets I have about my VC career.

So, when Jeff shared his plans to start Inertia last July, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to redeem myself and work on the other most important problem we face as a species: abundant, clean energy. There are a lot of nuclear fusion startups out there but Inertia will build its pilot plant based on the physics proven at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) — the only controlled fusion experiments to achieve net target energy gain, more energy produced from fusion than went into the experiment.

Yes, the round is larger than our typical $5–10M seed, but given the ginormous++ nature of the endeavor, we welcome it and we’re grateful to Jeff and his co-founders Dr. Annie Kritcher and Prof. Mike Dunne for giving us an opportunity to invest alongside our old friends at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Inertia co-founders: Prof. Mike Dunne, Jeff Lawson & Dr. Annie Kritcher

Nuclear fusion is no longer science fiction. I like the company’s tag line: “Inertia will create star power for life on Earth”.

More:
- funding press release
- a letter from the founders
- Jeff’s post
- Bloomberg
- Bessemer’s announcement

LFG!