The optics of the device were on display behind Yun Kai, co-founder and CEO of Cambridge Heavy Industries, while he chatted with me on a video call. The company has been operating in stealth out of a small lab near MIT, and Kai gave TechCrunch an exclusive look at the technology it has been developing. It’s tiny, it’s benchtop,” he told me.
Data from those experiments will feed simulations that use AI to optimize the design. That nimble approach has attracted investor attention. The startup recently raised a $6.2 million seed round led by Azolla Ventures with participation from Overlay, Neta Foundation, P3A, MassCEC, and the Rothrock family.
Cambridge Heavy’s fusion reactor uses lasers to compress a fuel target, similar to the groundbreaking experiment that proved controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they consume. But unlike other inertial confinement designs, Cambridge Heavy’s minimizes the number of lasers required to spark fusion. The system uses two main lasers to drive ignition.
One laser is split into multiple beam lines that deliver light in concentric rings. Those rings of laser light are timed to hit the flat, round fuel target successively, starting from the outside and working in. The first ring starts a compression wave within the target that starts traveling inward.
The subsequent laser rings are timed to boost the wave at just the right moment to further compress the fuel. As the shock wave reaches the center of the target, a laser fires on the target, generating heat and producing a magnetic field. With the right amount of pressure and heat, fusion occurs.
Cambridge Heavy’s design generates high pressures with relatively low laser power, Kai said. The concept emerged from the lab of Keith Nelson, a chemist at MIT. There, researchers used the laser pulses to study materials under extreme conditions.
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