Ex-DeepMind duo raises $3.7M to build fusion's software backbone
What's the deal? FusionalityDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Lausanne startup founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised CHF 3 million (about $3.7 million) in pre-seed funding. FounderfulDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Playfair led the round. The company builds measurement, simulation, and control systems for fusion companies.
What's the endgame? Co-founders Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli spent years developing AI to keep a 100 million-degree plasma cloud from touching a reactor's walls. Now they want to sell that expertise. "We have spent most of our careers making plasmas in real fusion devices behave as we wanted," said Felici, co-founder and chief executive.
Why now? More than 30 private fusion companies and government projects face the same problem: turning raw plasma measurements into control signals within milliseconds. Most build their own systems from scratch, and Fusionality offers a reusable software layer to cut onboarding costs.
How it started: Felici and Buchli met at EPFL's Swiss Plasma Center. Felici, a control engineer with a PhD in plasma physics, later spent two and a half years at DeepMind; Buchli led robotics and reinforcement learning teams there. In 2022, they published Nature research using deep reinforcement learning to shape plasma in the TCV tokamak.
What could go wrong? Fusionality competes with Next Step FusionDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, which already supplies plasma modelling and control software. There is also a bigger threat: in October 2025, DeepMind partnered with Commonwealth Fusion Systems and open-sourced its TORAX plasma simulator. If the best-funded fusion firm can get DeepMind's expertise for free, the market for paid third-party tools may shrink.
By the numbers: Private fusion investment hit a record $4.48 billion in the 12 months ending July 2026, per the Fusion Industry Association. Since 2021, the sector has drawn over $14 billion across 56 companies. Fusionality's round ranks in roughly the 92nd percentile among energy seed deals in Switzerland.
What they're saying: "The fusion industry is scaling faster than its supply chain, and the operations infrastructure is the clearest gap," said Playfair's Felix Neubeck. He called Felici and Buchli "among a very small number of people in the world who have worked across the range of technologies needed for fusion control & operations."
The signal: Fusion funding is pouring in, but most of it flows into reactors, not shared infrastructure. Fusionality is betting that as the industry scales, companies will stop rebuilding the same control software and start buying it — a picks-and-shovels play on a sector still years from commercial power.
Image credit: Fusionality
