Fuse, led by JC Btaiche, has signed agreements with national nuclear labs such as Los Alamos.
JC BtaicheTwenty-four-year-old JC Btaiche has raised $20 million and signed on Iran’s former top nuclear scientist and former Pentagon officials with an audacious goal: using nuclear fusion to solve all our energy problems.
By David Jeans, Forbes Staff
Since the first hydrogen bomb tests in the 1950s, scientists have struggled to develop a practical fusion energy source, one that would mimic the reactions that power the Sun for safe use here on Earth. The promise is world-changing: an infinite abundance of energy, vastly more powerful than fossil fuels without the associated carbon pollution.
Now, with the help of one of Iran's top nuclear scientists, a small team of former Pentagon and CIA officials are taking on that goal. Realistically, it’s far off — scientific consensus is that viable commercial fusion is at least a decade away, maybe two. But in the meantime, the company, called Fuse, has more immediate-term plans: using fusion technology to develop radiation testing facilities that simulate the effects of nuclear weapons on machinery. Fuse hopes to generate revenue from government contracts that can support its long-term R&D efforts — a business model that has excited Silicon Valley investors like Buckley Ventures and serial entrepreneur Sky Dayton enough to pour more than $20 million into the company.
Helming the unlikely team of military officials and scientists is JC Btaiche, a high school graduate who immigrated from Lebanon to North America in 2016 with an eye towards solving one of the world’s hardest problems. He has sold investors and employees on the idea that private industry can do for commercial fusion what it did for spaceflight: accelerate progress by solving the $24 billion National Nuclear Security Administration’s problems along the way to developing a viable fusion reactor. “Fuse wants to become to the NNSA, what SpaceX is to NASA,” the 24-year-old told Forbes.
It all seems a bit pie-in-the-sky. “A [fusion] power plant will require something akin to the Apollo program,” said Bjorn Hegelich, a fusion professor at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to the NASA program that put the first humans on the moon. “It's not going to be something that one startup will do.”
And then there’s Btaiche himself, who — without a background in nuclear science or even a college education — is taking on such a daunting challenge with a fraction of the money funding his rivals. And yet, investors are backing him. Fuse is currently in talks to raise another $20 million investment for a series A funding round. After signing agreements with nuclear labs Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, according to a pitch deck for the funding round, the company is expected to generate $2 million in revenue this year. (Btaiche declined to discuss the nature of the agreements; a spokesperson for Sandia and Los Alamos labs declined to comment).
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“The best founders just have this type of inevitability to them,” Josh Buckley, whose eponymous venture firm invested in Fuse, told Forbes. “And I just consistently started seeing JC over a period of time go through multiple brick walls.”
Btaiche’s timing is spot on. Following a fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore last year, the Biden Administration announced earlier this month it was spending $180 million to spur development of fusion energy, allocating an additional $46 million to public-private partnerships with multiple fusion energy companies.
Fuse CEO JC Btaiche and chief engineer Vahid Damideh, previously one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists at its Atomic Energy Organization.
JC BtaicheAmong those partnering with the government is Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which was spun out from MIT and has raised more than $2 billion from investors like George Soros and Bill Gates. Another is Seattle-based Zap Energy, also backed by Gates and energy giants Shell and Chevron, which have provided the company more than $200 million. Both companies are working towards commercially produced fusion energy. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is another player in the space, personally investing $375 million in Helion, which believes it can deploy a workable fusion power plant by 2028; it signed an energy deal with Microsoft last year.
It’s already a wildly competitive space, but Fuse’s backers are bullish on Btaiche’s idea to scale fusion technology alongside its radiation testing business. Btaiche “is surprisingly strategic in his thought process and he's built an amazing culture,” said Sean McKay, a U.S. Air Force veteran and retired Colonel who oversaw foreign military sales, and now leads Fuse’s government business. “That's why I'm taking a chance.”
The company’s lead engineer is Vahid Damideh, previously one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists at its Atomic Energy Organization, where he oversaw its National Nuclear Fusion Project, he told Forbes. At Fuse, he’s leading the development of its primary products, Titan and Faeton, which the company is pitching as a way to prepare America’s arsenal for potential nuclear fallout.
The two tools use so-called pulse power fusion to beam radiation onto machines — satellites, for instance — to simulate what would happen in the event of a nuclear attack. The company hopes to use this technology as the backbone of its ambitions to build fusion reactors, and ultimately harness fusion’s limitless energy potential to power space exploration. “This is the first time in history where the U.S. has two potential nuclear peer adversaries,” Btaiche said during a talk at the Reindustrialize defense tech conference last week. “This really puts us in a position where we have to build now.”
Btaiche met Damideh during a virtual conference on fusion technology in 2020. Damideh had been living in Canada, working as a postdoctoral researcher at Ontario Tech University, after leaving Iran in 2013 for a stint in Malaysia to study fusion at multiple universities there. Working with students for much of his career, Damideh said he gravitated to the young idealistic entrepreneur. “JC told me, ‘I will remove any other things from your life to let you just focus on science and technology,’” Damideh said. “I immediately joined.”
Fuse’s team also includes advisors and executives who came from the Pentagon and the CIA, including Laura Thomas, a former Afghanistan base chief for the CIA who is advising the company on a government relations strategy. Of Damideh’s background in Iran, she said, “I don't think it's typical, but it is only in America you would find a team like this. We want the best people and we also want people who care or have the same aligned values with the West.”
Growing up in Lebanon, Btaiche’s interest in the field was spurred by his father, who ran manufacturing facilities but had trained as a nuclear physicist. By the time he was in high school, he realized that his dream to make fusion energy wasn’t something he could do in Lebanon, and he booked a one-way flight to Canada at the age of 16, joining his older brother in Montreal (they have Canadian citizenship thanks to his father). Once there, he would often cut class so he could sit in on physics courses at McGill University. “I was learning more about the history of the universe, and all the problems in the world today, and fusion is at the centerpiece of all of those problems,” he said.
Around the time he was finishing up high school in 2019, Btaiche said he was introduced to a family office that wanted to launch a fusion company. With the idea of building a team of experts who could commercialize decades of research into fusion, he convinced them to write his first $2.5 million check, and began work on the company’s first research facility in Montreal. Soon after, “I was managing people whose kids are older than me,” he said.
Now, with around 30 employees, Fuse is building a new radiation testing facility in San Leandro, California, and looking to expand its team of engineers. To recruit them, Btaiche’s message has evolved to echo the machismo, pro-America ethos of other defense-focused hardware companies run by young founders (many of which are based in El Segundo, California). Job applicants should be “determined to see the rings of Saturn and stand on the surface of Pluto,” Fuse’s website states, adding: “Bureaucracy and red-tape isn’t for you. You've probably gotten in some trouble for pushing boundaries.”
