We’re excited to see Gigascale Capital highlight Xcimer Energy and our mission to deliver clean, safe, and abundant fusion energy. Technical and human progress has always been driven by increasing energy availability - this is known as the Henry Adams Curve. From fire to fission, every major leap in civilization has been powered by breakthroughs in energy. Fusion represents the next great step, and Xcimer is building the pathway to make it a reality. Over the past year, we’ve expanded from a small team to more than 60 world-class engineers and scientists, secured a $100M Series A, moved into a state-of-the-art facility, and made significant technical progress toward demonstrating a practical, scalable, and cost-effective inertial fusion system. Check out Gigascale’s post below for more on why they’re backing Xcimer: https://lnkd.in/gWbW5ZJk #FusionEnergy #CleanEnergy #XcimerEnergy
Energy drives humanity's greatest advancements. The Henry Adams Curve charts two centuries of American progress, with a steady 2-3% annual growth in energy use that got us everything from steam engines to jet aircraft. But by the 1970s, that progress stalled as the environmental costs of fossil fuels became impossible to ignore. Without a clear alternative energy source, human advancement hit a wall. At Los Alamos National Lab, Xcimer Energy Corporation founders Conner Galloway and Alexander Valys learned about a way forward. Their insight built on three overlooked breakthroughs: 1️⃣ Proving Fusion Ignition (1980s) The Halite-Centurion program proved fusion works with a large-enough fuel pellet, but replicating the results with a 10 megajoule laser as recommended by the National Academy of Sciences was too expensive. 2️⃣ High-Energy Lasers for Missile Defense (1980s) Significant defense program R&D advanced low-cost, high-energy excimer lasers, but the systems were shelved after the Cold War ended. 3️⃣ Laser Pulse Compression (1970s) Soviet researchers developed Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS), a technique to shorten laser pulses, but the work drew little attention in the West. Fast forward, and today Xcimer aims to make fusion power—the same process that fuels stars—commercially viable. "With fusion, we're manufacturing energy instead of drilling for it," says Galloway. A gigawatt fusion plant runs on fuel that fits in a pickup truck. No more mile-long coal trains. The raw materials are simple deuterium from water and lithium from Earth's crust. Enough exists to power human civilization for thousands of years. Today, the team at their Denver Phoenix facility is working to prove this vision. Their prototype will merge forgotten Cold War breakthroughs and government research with modern engineering advances to create a more affordable and scalable fusion system. We published a complete profile on what Conner and Alexander are building at Xcimer. Read more at the link in comments 👀