Photo credit: Jason Laurea / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
A “holy grail” breakthrough. The “biggest news of the decade.” Potentially “limitless clean energy.”
Those were the headlines that circulated the globe in December 2022, after fusion scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab reported they achieved fusion ignition for the first time in history — creating more energy that it took to start the reaction. The team, led by Dr. Annie Kritcher, has since repeated it more than 10 times; in April, a reaction produced a record four times its energy input.
The breakthrough put Kritcher at the top of the invite list for business conferences and lavish parties alike, including those hosted by Hollywood A-listers and billionaires. A chance meeting at one such gathering paved the way for the scientist’s next act: the December 2025 founding of Inertia, a company that aims to bring fusion ignition out of the lab and into an actual power plant.
Kritcher, after delivering a presentation about her work at LLNL, was approached by Jeff Lawson, a billionaire entrepreneur who made his fortune as co-founder and former CEO of the cloud communications platform Twilio. Lawson offered his congratulations, and said he assumed Kritcher’s team was working with commercial developers or another fusion company to bring their technology to market.
