TYPE ONE ENERGY

Type One started in 2019, when a few stellarator physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided over a meal to form a company. The co-founders were Randall Volberg, David Anderson, Chris Hegna, John Canik and Paul Harris.

Anderson and Hegna came out of HSX, the Wisconsin machine that was the world's first optimized stellarator. Their belief was contrarian.

For decades the fusion world poured money into the tokamak and treated the stellarator as a curiosity, because its magnets are nightmarishly complicated. The founders thought that was a mistake.

A stellarator does not need a big electric current running through the plasma, so it can run continuously and it does not blow itself off course the way a tokamak can. In 2023 they brought in Christofer Mowry, who used to run General Fusion, as CEO.

They also hired Thomas Sunn Pedersen, a leader from Germany's W7-X project, as chief technology officer. The company later moved its headquarters to Knoxville, Tennessee.

Type One makes no money yet. It is building machines, not selling power.

The plan is to be a fusion technology provider. It designs stellarator power plants and sells or licenses them to utilities, which own and run them and sell the electricity.

Its first would-be customer is the Tennessee Valley Authority, a giant public power company, which signed a letter of intent for a plant at one of its old coal sites. Type One calls its approach FusionDirect.

The idea is to be capital-efficient by leaning on existing suppliers and existing power-plant sites instead of building every single thing from scratch.

Infinity One is the prototype stellarator Type One wants to build first, planned for the TVA Bull Run site in Tennessee. Infinity Two is the real prize, a first-generation 350 megawatt fusion power plant meant to feed steady electricity to the grid.

The technology underneath both is a stellarator built with high-temperature superconducting magnets shaped into complex non-planar coils. Modern supercomputing lets them optimize that twisted magnetic field in ways the original stellarator builders could only dream of.

Right now these are engineering programs, not products you can buy.

The smartest move Type One made was where it chose to build. Its prototype and first plant are planned for TVA's retired Bull Run coal site near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and in 2026 Tennessee granted it an initial operating license for that project.

The site already has the grid connection, the cooling water, the trained workforce, and a community that wants the jobs back. You are not starting in an empty field.

You are recycling a dead coal plant into a fusion plant. It also pulled in Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a partner, Tennessee's state nuclear energy fund, and in 2026 Siemens Energy as an investor.

The coal-to-fusion story writes its own headlines, and it makes politicians and utilities comfortable. That is half the battle in energy.

Building a stellarator is brutally hard. The magnet coils are twisted 3D shapes that have to be manufactured to millimeter tolerances.

Germany's W7-X took roughly 19 years and over a billion euros to build, and it is only a research machine. It has never produced net energy.

Type One has to build something commercial, cheaper, and faster than that. On top of the engineering, there is the fusion curse itself.

No machine on Earth has ever produced more energy than it consumed in a steady, controlled way. Type One is targeting the mid-2030s.

In a field that has been twenty years away for sixty years, that is an aggressive promise.

Type One is backed by serious climate money. Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures is the anchor investor and has led or co-led every priced round.

TDK Ventures and Doral Energy-Tech Ventures came in at seed, and GD1 and Centaurus Capital co-led the 2024 extension. In January 2026 it raised $87 million on a convertible note, and in October 2026 it closed a $200 million Series B co-led by Breakthrough and Clutterbuck Capital, with Lowercarbon Capital, Siemens Energy Ventures and SiteGround Capital joining.

Reuters put total funding above $400 million. Beyond the venture money, the company has the Tennessee Valley Authority as a would-be customer, Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a research partner, and support from Tennessee's state nuclear energy fund.