Sachin and Adam
00:14:10 · Sachin, Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:14:10] S1: And when you think about kind of the path forward, the path, you know, our audience watching will be thinking about, okay, this all sounds great. It seems like good in theory that this can be scalable. When do you think people can expect tangible progress in this field? [00:14:26] S0: I mean, I think you're seeing it right here where we're sitting, right? The nice thing about our modular approach and about the way we structured our financing is that you can lay out a very methodical roadmap of actually delivering things that work on your way to this big goal. So as Keith likely mentioned, the pulsar that we're building the driver in Albuquerque consists of a 156 identical modules. You're sitting next to one of them here. You can build one of them, show that it works, build the factory, show that you can meet your manufacturing milestones, and then you're on your way. And that's true for a lot of other parts of our system as well. So I think we're seeing very tangible progress on the path of delivering this big project right here, And it builds on breakthroughs in the last couple of years that changed the risk profile of building such a machine really materially. [00:15:08] S2: Can you break down that roadmap a little bit more? So we've got building a module, then building lots of modules, I think showcasing net facility gain, and then is that when commercial agreements come? Like, what does that road map to commerciality look like?
00:15:08 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:15:08] S2: Can you break down that roadmap a little bit more? So we've got building a module, then building lots of modules, I think showcasing net facility gain, and then is that when commercial agreements come? Like, what does that road map to commerciality look like? [00:15:22] S0: Yeah. So I think taking a big step back and just looking at the fusion field Yeah. A couple of big milestones that matter on the way to commercial power. The first is scientific gain. Like, can you get more energy out of the fuel than went into the fuel? That was done in 2022 at the National Ignition Facility. The next big, big milestone for the field is can you build a fusion machine that produces net energy, so it produces more fusion energy than was stored in the system? That's what we're working to do in Albuquerque by 2030. And when you look at our milestone gated financing, it ties to the milestones associated with delivering that product, and we can talk about what some of those are. Then once you've done that, the question is, okay. Can you harness that fusion energy to boil water, turn a turbine, and deliver power to a customer? That's the final step toward commercialization. So for us, we're working to deliver net facility gain by 2030, first power plant by the mid twenty thirties, and a lot of the milestones along the way relate to demonstrating that the core components of those systems work as expected so that by the time we've built the full thing, we can be confident that it will work.
00:16:16 · Sachin, Carrie von Muench
[00:16:16] S1: And what was the process of structuring this kind of financing? It seems like you got it all laid out. Obviously, you've been on the venture side before. Was this kind of a first to market way of structuring how you guys have done this round? I know that like in biotech, you know, there's been this kinds of stage gated funding for a while, but as far as I'm aware, it's not as common in in things like nuclear. [00:16:38] S0: Yeah. I had certainly hadn't seen it done in fusion before and not just just because I haven't seen it done doesn't mean it hasn't been done, but like I hadn't seen it been... I hadn't seen it be done in this way in in a hard tech, particularly for a series a of this size. Yeah. Billion dollars out of the gate is a pretty substantial amount of capital to raise and deploy against a project. The the examples that we sort of drew inspiration from were largely in biotech Yeah. Because, again, similar dynamics, not a lot of market risk, technical risk primarily. You know, if you deliver x technical thing at the end of the road, you've built something really valuable. You can build a plan to deliver that, and you can agree with your investors about what progress looks like on that plan. But I really like it. It it aligns incentives so well. It's like nobody cares about the intermediate stuff. All that matters is how quickly and capital efficiently can we deliver this big goal. Let's set up the financing to maximize the probability of that outcome.
00:16:38 · Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:16:38] S0: Yeah. I had certainly hadn't seen it done in fusion before and not just just because I haven't seen it done doesn't mean it hasn't been done, but like I hadn't seen it been... I hadn't seen it be done in this way in in a hard tech, particularly for a series a of this size. Yeah. Billion dollars out of the gate is a pretty substantial amount of capital to raise and deploy against a project. The the examples that we sort of drew inspiration from were largely in biotech Yeah. Because, again, similar dynamics, not a lot of market risk, technical risk primarily. You know, if you deliver x technical thing at the end of the road, you've built something really valuable. You can build a plan to deliver that, and you can agree with your investors about what progress looks like on that plan. But I really like it. It it aligns incentives so well. It's like nobody cares about the intermediate stuff. All that matters is how quickly and capital efficiently can we deliver this big goal. Let's set up the financing to maximize the probability of that outcome. [00:17:26] S1: And how aggressive did you lay out the milestones? Right? There's philosophies on this. There's like the mask approach, is like half the time that it logically takes to do that, but obviously, for you guys, you need to hit the milestones. Otherwise, the funding may not come through. So how did you how do you go about, like, structuring how aggressive you actually make these milestones? [00:17:43] S0: You mean on... Like, with respect to schedule? [00:17:45] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:17:45 · Sachin, Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:17:45] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:17:46] S0: Think we... Our our goal generally is to make promises and keep them. And that's not to say you can always perfectly predict everything, but that's typically how we have structured this work. We tend to go for ambitious but achievable. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's broadly how we've how we've done this so far. I will say that that level of structure and discipline has made it possible to go from series a capital into groundbreaking on a major project in less than three years [00:18:11] S2: Yeah. [00:18:11] S0: Which, to my knowledge, hasn't been done before in our field. Again, maybe it hasn't. I'm not aware. Maybe it has been done in China, but I haven't seen it. And the body of work to make that possible, right, includes big team doing a full engineering design effort, making sure you've got a full bottoms up cost estimate, building and validating the component, showing that they work, going through and qualifying a really large base of suppliers that hasn't delivered these these kinds of systems all of the development work, all of the community engagement, permitting, and licensing work to get this thing built. Huge body of work on the part of our team to to derisk this project to the point where we could make... Break ground. And I think a lot of that was possible because we had so much structure and discipline around the road map from the beginning.
00:18:11 · Carrie von Muench, Adam Miller
[00:18:11] S0: Which, to my knowledge, hasn't been done before in our field. Again, maybe it hasn't. I'm not aware. Maybe it has been done in China, but I haven't seen it. And the body of work to make that possible, right, includes big team doing a full engineering design effort, making sure you've got a full bottoms up cost estimate, building and validating the component, showing that they work, going through and qualifying a really large base of suppliers that hasn't delivered these these kinds of systems all of the development work, all of the community engagement, permitting, and licensing work to get this thing built. Huge body of work on the part of our team to to derisk this project to the point where we could make... Break ground. And I think a lot of that was possible because we had so much structure and discipline around the road map from the beginning. [00:18:50] S2: With the roadmap you said before, so if you achieve all those different states like net facility gains, steam turbines, once you do all that and you prove it out, is that then just a obvious pathway towards tens of billions of dollars of revenue? Because once you've done that, we need cheap, clean, abundant energy. Is it as simple as that? Like, this is gonna take over the energy market?