From Twilio to the Sun: Jeff Lawson's Plan to Industrialise Fusion

Key points

Key takeaways from TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 interview with Inertia co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson (October 2026):

Why fusion now. Lawson says the December 2022 ignition milestone at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory convinced him fusion could become reality in his lifetime, but nobody was commercialising the proven physics — so he co-founded Inertia with Dr Andrea Kritcher, the lead designer of the ignition experiment, who was awarded the E.O. Lawrence Award by the Department of Energy on the day of this interview.

Fix the economics, not the physics. Lawson frames fusion as a two-by-two bet: most of the roughly $10B of private capital in the sector has gone to approaches that would be economical if they ever worked but remain unproven after decades, while Inertia takes the configuration already proven at the National Ignition Facility and works to make it cheap — a smaller, more powerful and more efficient laser plus mass-produced fuel targets.

The laser problem. Livermore's driver is three football fields long, ten stories tall and only 0.5 per cent efficient because it runs on vacuum tubes, the risk-minimising choice of the 1990s. Inertia is moving to high-power laser diodes — the same switch from vacuum tubes to semiconductors the rest of industry made long ago — to shrink and speed up the driver.

Targets from a factory. NIF's peppercorn-sized fuel capsules cost around half a million dollars each and only about six are made by hand every year; a power plant would need roughly a million a day. Lawson argues the four-part target — a lead hohlraum stamped like a bullet, a carbon shell grown by chemical vapour deposition and a polymer binder — all have direct parallels in industry today, making this an industrial scale-up and a supply-chain build rather than basic science.

The Livermore spin-out. Inertia licensed around 200 patents from Lawrence Livermore, signed three joint research agreements and a first-of-its-kind arrangement that lets Kritcher keep her lab affiliation while working as a founder; Lawson calls it the largest public-private partnership between a company and a national lab in the history of the national lab system.

Scale-up so far. Having raised $450M of Series A commitments led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Inertia runs a 50,000-square-foot facility in Livermore about two miles from the lab, had around 75 staff at the time of the interview — up from five at the start of the year — and recruits manufacturing veterans from Apple and Waymo to build first-of-a-kind supply chains.

Timetable. Inertia plans to break ground on its fusion pilot plant in 2029, reach first light around 2035 as construction begins on a second plant, and have three plants operating or under construction by the end of the 2030s.

Fusion's IPO moment. Lawson likens fusion to drug discovery: the 'FDA approval' milestone is a privately built facility demonstrating net energy gain and putting its first electron on the grid, after which early investors exit and public capital carries the company to meaningful revenue. He also reflects on Twilio, which he took public in 2016 partly to gain legitimacy as a misunderstood developer company, and advises founders to be clear on why they are listing.

Read more: TechCrunch