Zap Energy
Assembly Line
Zap Energy attracts $130M in fresh capital as demo power plant system begins operations and aims for first milestone
Zap’s $130 million Series D was led by Soros Fund Management LLC, with participation by new investors that include BAM Elevate, Emerson Collective, Leitmotif, Mizuho Financial Group, Plynth Energy and Xplor Ventures. Current investors participating in the new round include Addition, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, DCVC, Energy Impact Partners, Lowercarbon Capital and Shell Ventures. The new funding will be used to continue parallel development of both plasma R&D and systems-level plant engineering and integration, including the next generation in the company’s FuZE device series and a cutting-edge pulsed power capacitor bank.
Century is the first fully-integrated demonstration of several fusion power plant-relevant technologies, including one of the largest tests of a plasma-facing liquid metal blanket to date. Century has already demonstrated a test run of more than 1,000 consecutive plasmas in less than three hours into a chamber lined with flowing liquid metal.
Zap Energy’s fusion approach, known as a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch, avoids large superconducting magnets and powerful lasers, and is far smaller than conventional systems. To generate net energy from fusion, regardless of the type of device, the plasmas inside must satisfy fusion’s triple product: they must be hot enough, and dense enough, for long enough. With a track record of rapid progress in plasma physics using two workhorse fusion devices, and recent results reinforcing the viability of the path ahead, Zap has begun work engineering new devices to face greater extremes and harness fusion’s energy output.