The Everett, Washington-based fusion energy startup Helion announced Friday that it has hit a key milestone in its quest for fusion power. Plasmas inside the company’s Polaris prototype reactor have reached 150 million degrees Celsius, three-quarters of the way toward what the company thinks it will need to operate a commercial fusion power plant.

“We’re obviously really excited to be able to get to this place,” David Kirtley, Helion’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

Polaris is also operating using deuterium-tritium fuel — a mixture of two hydrogen isotopes — which Kirtley said makes Helion the first fusion company to do so. “We were able to see the fusion power output increase dramatically as expected in the form of heat,” he said.

The startup is locked in a race with several other companies that are seeking to commercialize fusion power, a potentially unlimited source of clean energy.

That potential has investors rushing to bet on the technology. This week, Inertia Enterprises announced a $450 million Series A round that included Bessemer and GV. In January, Type One Energy told TechCrunch it was in the midst of raising $250 million, while last summer Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $863 million from investors including Google and Nvidia. Helion itself raised $425 million last year from a group that included Sam Altman, Mithril, Lightspeed, and SoftBank.

While most other fusion startups are targeting the early 2030s to put electricity on the grid, Helion has a contract with Microsoft to sell it electricity starting in 2028, though that power would come from a larger commercial reactor called Orion that the company is currently building, not Polaris.

Every fusion startup has its own milestones based on the design of its reactor. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example, needs to heat its plasmas to more than 100 million degrees C inside of its tokamak, a doughnut-shaped device that uses powerful magnets to contain the plasma.

Helion’s reactor is different, needing plasmas that are about twice as hot to function as intended. 

The company’s reactor design is what’s called a field-reversed configuration. The inside chamber looks like an hourglass, and at the wide ends, fuel gets injected and turned into plasmas. Magnets then accelerate the plasmas toward each other. When they first merge, they’re around 10 million to 20 million degrees C. Powerful magnets then compress the merged ball further, raising the temperature to 150 million degrees C. It all happens in less than a millisecond.

Instead of extracting energy from the fusion reactions in the form of heat, Helion uses the fusion reaction’s own magnetic field to generate electricity. Each pulse will push back against the reactor’s own magnets, inducing electrical current that can be harvested. By harvesting electricity directly from the fusion reactions, the company hopes to be more efficient than its competitors.

Over the last year, Kirtley said that Helion had refined some of the circuits in the reactor to boost how much electricity they recover.

While the company uses deuterium-tritium fuel today, down the road it plans to use deuterium-helium-3. Most fusion companies plan to use deuterium-tritium and extract energy as heat. Helion’s fuel choice, deuterium-helium-3, produces more charged particles, which push forcefully against the magnetic fields that confine the plasma, making it better suited for Helion’s approach of generating electricity directly.

Helion’s ultimate goal is to produce plasmas that hit 200 million degrees C, far higher than other companies’ targets, a function of its reactor design and fuel choice. “We believe that at 200 million degrees, that’s where you get into that optimal sweet spot of where you want to operate a power plant,” Kirtley said.

When asked whether Helion had reached scientific breakeven — the point where a fusion reaction generates more energy than it requires to start it — Kirtley demurred. “We focus on the electricity piece, making electricity, rather than the pure scientific milestones.”

Helium-3 is common on the Moon, but not here on Earth, so Helion must make its own fuel. To start, it’ll fuse deuterium nuclei to produce the first batches. In regular operation, while the main source of power will be deuterium-helium-3 fusion, some of the reactions will still be deuterium-on-deuterium, which will produce helium-3 that the company will purify and reuse.

Work is already underway to refine the fuel cycle. “It’s been a pleasant surprise in that a lot of that technology has been easier to do than maybe we expected,” Kirtley said. Helion has been able to produce helium-3 “at very high efficiencies in terms of both throughput and purity,” he added.

While Helion is currently the only fusion startup using helium-3 in its fuel, Kirtley said he thinks other companies will in the future, hinting that he’d be open to selling it to them. “Other folks — as they come along and recognize that they want to do this approach of direct electricity recovery and see the efficiency gains from it — will want to be using helium-3 fuel as well,” he said.

Alongside its experiments with Polaris, Helion is also building Orion, a 50-megawatt fusion reactor it needs to fulfill its Microsoft contract “Our ultimate goal is not to build and deliver Polaris,” Kirtley said. “That’s a step along the way towards scaled power plants.”

Two years ago, Luke Bailey had what became a controversial app idea — a dating app called Score for people with good to excellent credit. 

Launched just days before Valentine’s Day, the app required users to have a credit score of at least 675 to register. At the time, Bailey said he created the app to encourage partners to talk more about personal finance since doing so is often uncomfortable for many people. 

“Fifty-four percent of people say a partner’s debt is a reason to consider divorce,” Bailey told TechCrunch. “Financial compatibility is quietly one of the most important relationship factors, yet no dating platform addresses it directly.” 

The app had its fair share of critics, and many people indeed called it classist because of its focus on those who handle money well. Still, the app, which was supposed to be available for 90 days, became so popular that Bailey kept it around for six months. It amassed 50,000 users and made headlines worldwide for its premise. 

Then, it went away, and all went back to normal in the world of dating. Until Friday. 

Bailey told TechCrunch that he’s decided to officially bring Score back — for good, this time. 

“We originally released Score to integrate financial responsibility into something people deeply value — love,” Bailey said. “When we shut it down, we assumed the conversation would continue without us. It didn’t.” 

Instead, he said people kept asking him why he shut it down. “Academics have even reached out wanting to study behavior impact,” he continued. “It became clear this wasn’t just a viral moment. It tapped into something unresolved in relationship culture.” 

This time around, Score will be available on the iOS App Store (last time it was just a mobile app, he said, because he and his team built it so quickly). Bailey also said this version of the app will be more inclusive, having taken into account the feedback that it was too exclusive. “So now, everyone can join.”

There will be two tiers: the basic tier, where no ID or credit verification is required, and anyone can browse and connect. And then the verified tier, where members must verify their ID and credit score to unlock premium features. The app uses Equifax to verify both identity and credit scores, with users giving consent for the app to do so. It does only what Bailey described as a soft pull, so there is no impact to credit.

“We don’t store full credit reports or sensitive personal and financial data. We simply receive confirmation that someone meets the Verified criteria,” he said. 

The verified plan includes features that let people see other members nearby, see who has saved their profile, send video intros to potential matches, and send messages to users before they’ve swiped back. 

He’s still bullish on using credit scores, saying that it’s not a measure of wealth but rather one of consistency. “Banks look for the same thing in customers that we look for in relationships — consistency and reliability,” he said. “Dating apps measure attrition. We measure attrition plus accountability.” 

Bailey said the app doesn’t store any sensitive data, doesn’t sell personal data, and secures everything using an encrypted infrastructure. 

The last iteration of Score amassed a lot of data on its users, helping show how each generation has been affected by socioeconomic factors. For example, it found that millennial men had credit scores about 11% higher than those of women. But for Gen Zers, that gap was much smaller, with men having a credit score only 3% higher. 

“We’ll be watching how that data [has] evolved,” he said. 

The original Score was a U.S.-only experiment, he said, but this time, the company plans a global expansion, starting with Canada. Keep an eye out for some partnerships, too, he said. 

“Financial behavior is one of the strongest predictors of life stability,” Bailey said. “We believe compatibility algorithms should reflect that.”

Meta plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses as soon as this year, according to a new report from The New York Times. The feature, internally known as “Name Tag,” would allow smart glasses wearers to identify people and get information about them through Meta’s AI assistant.

Meta’s plans could change, the report notes. The tech giant has been deliberating since early last year on how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks.”

According to an internal memo, the company had originally planned to release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the visually impaired before releasing it to the public, but didn’t end up doing that.

Meta reportedly saw the political tumult in the United States as a good time to release the feature.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” the document reads.

Meta considered adding facial recognition technology to the first version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses back in 2021, but dropped the plans over technical challenges and ethical concerns. The NYT reports that the company has revived its plans as the Trump administration has grown closer to big tech, and following the unexpected success of its smart glasses.