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Avalanche hit a fusion checkpoint for under $50 million, at desk size
A Seattle startup's tabletop reactor reached 11 million degrees Celsius — a threshold the fusion community watches — on less than $50 million of venture capital.
A Seattle startup's tabletop reactor reached 11 million degrees Celsius — a threshold the fusion community watches — on less than $50 million of venture capital.
Fusion's most expensive bet is that the path to a working power plant runs through increasingly massive machines. Avalanche Energy, a Seattle startup building a reactor that fits on a desk, just put a small, cheap counter-thesis on the table.
The company told TechCrunch its desktop prototype heated a plasma to roughly 11 million degrees Celsius, hot enough to clear the 10-million-degree threshold that only a handful of companies in the world have reached. Crossing that line matters because the fusion community watches temperature in kiloelectron volts, the unit physicists actually use for particle energy, and 1 keV is the marker everyone is hunting for. "That's hot enough that the world will take notice," Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob Mumgaard told TechCrunch.
The temperature headline is not the only thing that makes the result interesting. What sets Avalanche apart from the rest of that small club is what the company says it spent to get there. Avalanche claims to have reached the milestone on less than $50 million of venture capital. Most fusion startups that have hit comparable temperatures burned through far more cash before crossing the same line, according to TechCrunch's reporting. The cost gap is the story, not the plasma.
Plasma temperature is a physics milestone, not a commercial one. Hitting 11 million degrees does not mean the reactor produced net energy, sustained a fusion reaction for more than a heartbeat, or is anywhere close to powering a building. Avalanche's result was reviewed by a plasma physicist at MIT, according to TechCrunch, but it has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal. The honest read is that Avalanche cleared a checkpoint on a long road map, not the finish line.
Fusion programs have a long history of choosing size. Public megaprojects such as ITER, the international tokamak under construction in France, and the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore were designed around the premise that the easiest path to ignition meant the largest, most powerful machines money could build. Private fusion over the last decade has split into two camps. One camp, anchored by Commonwealth Fusion Systems and others, has tried to shrink the tokamak while keeping the megaproject playbook: well-funded, slowly iterated, and aimed at grid-scale power. The other, where Avalanche sits, bets that the path to a working reactor runs through a smaller, cheaper, faster device, even if the underlying physics is harder.
The harder question is whether the small-machine thesis holds up as the company pushes toward net energy. Avalanche's competitors have years of head starts in capital, supply chains, and engineering depth. Avalanche's bet is that iterating on a tabletop device, with shorter build cycles and a lower burn rate, can catch up by moving faster per dollar. The case gets more attractive if Avalanche can keep showing that each round of hardware and plasma work runs cheaper than the last.
If the approach works, the target market is not utility-scale baseload. Avalanche has talked publicly about competing with diesel generators and natural gas turbines for distributed power, the kind of remote or mobile loads that today's grid handles badly. A small fusion core that fits in a truck, if one ever exists, would not replace a gas plant. It would replace the diesel generator. That is a smaller prize than lighting a city, but it is a real market, and one where size and cost matter more than raw output.
The next signal to watch is independent validation. The MIT review gives the result credibility, but the fusion community treats peer-reviewed data, and eventually third-party replication, as the test that separates a real milestone from a company announcement. Until then, 11 million degrees is a number to take seriously, not a promise to plan around.