Focused Energy is a Darmstadt-based deep tech scale-up developing commercial fusion power plants using laser-driven inertial confinement fusion. Founded in 2020, this German company is building on the breakthrough achievements made at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – the only fusion approach to demonstrate net energy gain – to create a commercially viable path to clean, limitless energy.

We recently caught up with Thomas Forner, CEO of Focused Energy, to discuss their groundbreaking approach to fusion energy, the company's world-class team, their journey’s wins and challenges, as well as their membership in EIC Scaling Club's Clean Fuels & Hydrogen group. 

Closer to the dream of limitless, clean energy 

Focused Energy is pursuing laser-driven inertial confinement fusion using a central hotspot approach – essentially replicating what Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved in their historic breakthrough. Thomas explains the process: “We are compressing tiny pellets, the size of two millimetres, with lasers from all sides until it gets to fusion conditions – the density and the heat – and then fusion reactions start to propagate through the fuel. That's how you generate the energy”.

What makes this approach particularly promising, Thomas notes, is its proven track record. 

"It's one of the best explored approaches, alongside tokamaks or stellarators, and it's the only approach that has demonstrated net energy gain so far."

This distinction is crucial in the fusion landscape, where multiple competing approaches vie for attention and funding. Focused Energy's decision to build on a scientifically validated pathway – rather than pursuing unproven concepts – provides a clearer route to commercial viability.

The all-stars of fusion

The company boasts an extraordinary team. Thomas co-founded Focused Energy four and a half years ago with Professor Markus Roth, a plasma physicist who dedicated the last three decades to fusion research, now the company’s Chief Science Officer. Roth built a target laboratory at the Technical University of Darmstadt that became the foundation for Focused Energy's operations.

The leadership roster includes scientists who were directly instrumental in achieving fusion ignition.

“We have the team from Lawrence Livermore who have seen ignition and who have worked on ignition. Debbie Callahan, Pravesh Patel – they were among the leading scientists who demonstrated ignition back in 2022, and when they reached the goal of ignition and that energy gain, they quit and joined us.”

Beyond the scientific luminaries, Focused Energy has attracted top-tier engineering talent, totalling a team of 100 employees representing 21 different nationalities. “We just hired one of the leading engineers at ASML. He was looking for a new challenge and wanted to build the next even more complex machine after ASML. Then we have other engineers from space, from fission, from the automotive industry, from many other branches, and scientists from all over the world.”

Building a new industry from the ground up

The challenge facing Focused Energy is immense: transforming a laboratory demonstration into commercial reality at unprecedented speed and scale. 

“Lawrence Livermore has demonstrated that net energy gain is working. But the first shot took them 10 years. From the first to the second, it took them another year. Then from the second to the third, it was probably a bit more than a quarter. Now, they do it almost once a month. We want to do it 10 times a second.”

This leap from monthly laboratory shots to 10 shots per second represents more than incremental improvement – it requires reimagining every aspect of the system, and now poses more of an engineering challenge than anything else, says Thomas.

The challenge extends to manufacturing at scale, particularly for the laser systems. “To compress this tiny pellet, we need roughly 1,000 to 1,500 lasers. These lasers are high-energy lasers with over a kilojoule for each laser and they are produced like satellites – manually,” Thomas elaborates. 

“If you want to build power plants, you have to produce the lasers like cars, and this means you have to work on the supply chain. You don't build a start-up. You build a whole new ecosystem.”

Beyond technical challenges, gaining recognition presented another significant hurdle. “One of the biggest challenges was to get visible – from a small start-up that nobody knows, to create awareness, to be recognised by industry, to be recognised by politicians, to receive grants, to work as a catalyser within the industry, to bring together academia and industry and help build the ecosystem.”

The company achieved a breakthrough by securing RWE as a strategic partner – a first customer and as an investor. RWE is Europe's largest energy producer, and their involvement validates Focused Energy's approach. Thomas notes that “they bring in the perspective of a customer – what do you need to maintain a power plant, to run a power plant, to manage uptime, to licence everything. They have fantastic engineers who really push us to become an engineering company and to build stuff.”

Another major achievement was building their first facility, featuring all the necessary space and equipment, including for building their patented fuel pellets – from micro-milling machines to microscopes, lasers, and cryo facilities. The facility opened this year, marking a tangible step towards commercial fusion power.

A Club for recognition and partnerships

As to Focused Energy's membership in the EIC Scaling Club, it serves clear strategic purposes. 

“The reason why we applied and joined is definitely to create awareness, to be seen as one of the European scale-ups, to attract investors, to attract partners. I think that has worked.”

The benefits have extended beyond visibility. “We had a few mentors that helped us to create partnerships. We are also part of the EIC STEP programme,” Thomas notes. The EIC connection has also further solidified relationships with the European Investment Bank. “We have a very good relationship with EIB when it comes to project financing and we’re already speaking about how larger projects can be financed in the future.”

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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