Tech
When will fusion power startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems go public?
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is the best-funded fusion power startup, having raised $4 billion from investors over the last seven years, including the $1 billion the company has raised now.
Now, developments at CFS, plus rumblings from industry sources TechCrunch has spoken with in recent months, suggest that the startup might go public in the next two or three years.
One of those developments was the appointment of Lorence Kim as CFS’s new chief financial officer this week. Kim’s previous stint as a CFO was at Moderna, a biotech which specializes in mRNA therapies, which he joined in 2014 and subsequently helped take public in December 2018. He stuck around another year-and-a-half before returning to biotech investing.
Kim said he sees “something very familiar” in CFS. “Fusion today is where mRNA was a decade ago: scientifically real, commercially yet-to-be-proven, and closer than the consensus thinks,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
The choice might seem unusual, but Kim isn’t the first fusion executive to come with a background in the biotech world: Eric Lander, who helped lead the Human Genome Project, co-founded Pacific Fusion and now serves as its CEO.
“Lorence offers the unique experience of bringing to the world a completely novel, mission-driven product that sits at the intersection of breakthrough deep science, geopolitical urgency, and deployment at scale and speed,” Christine Dunn, head of external communications at CFS, told TechCrunch. She added that Kim said his arrival doesn’t necessarily mean that IPO preparations are underway.
Moderna took four-and-a-half years to IPO after Kim joined. But given the progress at CFS (and Kim’s recent arrival, protestations notwithstanding), the startup is likely to go public sooner than that.
A few points support our theory of a shorter timeline.
First, Moderna develops therapies for human diseases that don’t hit the market until they’re approved by the FDA, which requires data from lengthy and costly clinical trials. That timeline is driven by the fact that human lives are at stake.
With fusion, however, the potential of deadly errors is lower. Fusion reactors fizzle out instead of melting down, so they’re safer than fission reactors. Recognizing that, federal regulators have given the fusion industry guidelines that are distinct from the fission industry. In that sense, CFS has greater control over its destiny.
Second, CFS is making steady progress on Sparc, its demonstration reactor. Years ago, it had hoped to get the device up and running by 2025, and it is now targeting a launch later this year. Still, a large, first-of-a-kind project can avoid some delays, and CFS has managed to keep them from becoming excessive. The company hopes that by next year, Sparc will achieve scientific breakeven — when a fusion reaction produces more energy than was required to start it.
So far, only one experiment has achieved scientific breakeven, so reaching that milestone would help CFS show investors that it is making steady progress toward commercialization.
Lastly, CFS has started work on its commercial-scale power plant, Arc. It has selected a site in Chesterfield County, Virginia, and has started receiving the necessary permits. CFS hopes to have Arc up and running in the early 2030s.
If CFS goes public in the coming years, it will still have several years of heavy expenditures ahead. From that perspective, hiring Kim may prove a wise move, considering he oversaw Moderna during its early years as a public company, when it was losing money until the COVID-19 pandemic delivered an unexpected windfall.
The current AI data center boom is a similar sort of black swan event, so it makes sense that CFS will want to strike before investor appetite wanes.
One fusion company, General Fusion, went public via a SPAC deal earlier this month, and another, TAE Technologies, will do so by merging with Trump Media and Technology Group. Tech companies today are buying electricity at seemingly any cost.
CFS knows this, having already sold half the output of its first power plant to Google. But IPO windows don’t last forever, and CFS won’t want to let this opportunity pass it by.
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Tech
OpenAI reportedly finds evidence that more of its agents ran amok
Much has been made of the incident in which one of OpenAI’s agents broke out of its sandboxed test environment and proceeded to hack the AI hosting platform Hugging Face. OpenAI has since launched an investigation into how the incident occurred, which is still ongoing.
Now, anonymous sources have told Reuters that more of OpenAI’s agents are believed to have escaped their sandboxes. However, one source downplayed the severity, saying that with those escapes, the agents didn’t appear to leave OpenAI’s network to hack into another company’s. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for more information.
AI programs acting in bizarre ways has apparently become a weird, almost bragging point for companies. The same week, Anthropic also announced that it had discovered not one, but three instances in which its agents had escaped test environments and hacked other organizations.
AI companies have also been accused of using such incidents for marketing purposes — as they generate considerable attention and may underscore how powerful the companies’ products are. The flip side of that is that these disclosures are also ramping up discussions of government regulations.
Tech
Repeat founder Ryan Williams raises $10M seed for an AI startup for private credit managers
Ellis AI announced Thursday its emergence from stealth with $10 million in seed funding from investors including First Round Capital, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, Slow Capital, Kearny Jackson, and Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson.
Ellis uses AI agents to tackle the fragmented workflow private credit managers deal with, including managing documents, spreadsheets, and correspondence. The company was founded by Ryan Williams, best known for co-creating the real estate investment platform Cadre alongside Josh and Jared Kushner back in 2014. That company raised more than $160 million in funding and, at its peak, was valued at $800 million before being sold for an undisclosed sum to the alternative investment company Yieldstreet in 2024.
“At Cadre, I saw the next major constraint,” Williams said. “Even as the front end of private markets became more modern and accessible, the operating infrastructure underneath it remained fragmented.”
He started working on Ellis last year. The company seeks to connect and centralize all the scattered software, accounting information, and documents a private credit firm would use into one easily accessible platform. The system can flag discrepancies in the data and uses AI agents to help perform tasks like portfolio monitoring and preparing reports.
For example, Williams promises the agents can help close a fund’s books at the end of the month.
“A team may have to download files from several systems, reformat the data, compare balances, investigate discrepancies, and re-enter information by hand. In many firms, Excel becomes the operating system,” he continued. “Ellis connects to the systems and documents a firm already uses rather than forcing it to rip everything out and start over.”
It keeps a human in the loop, too, he says. “Material decisions and actions remain with the human experts,” he said.
“I expect the human loop to become narrower, but not disappear,” he continued, when asked if he sees a day when the AI works fully autonomously. “Our goal is not to replace human judgment; it’s to help people cut through the noise and make educated decisions faster.”
This piece was updated to add an investor.
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Tech
Tesla reportedly might sell its China business ahead of a SpaceX merger
Tesla is reportedly considering cleaving off its entire business in China to grease the wheels of a merger with SpaceX, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper reports that “some Tesla executives have been told to prepare for a separation of the China business,” which could include a “spinoff, sale or closure,” citing unnamed sources. The company reportedly would be able to do this fairly quickly because CEO Elon Musk had already tasked executives to prepare for a split in the event that Beijing invades Taiwan.
Separating China from Tesla’s global operations could make it easier to integrate the company into SpaceX, which is a defense contractor that has to follow strict rules around citizenship and national security. That would also be a major concession. China has grown to dominate Tesla’s business, not only as a market for its vehicles, but as a production hub that serves Asia more broadly, and also Europe.
OpenAI reportedly finds evidence that more of its agents ran amok
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