Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is the best funded fusion power startup, having raised $4 billion from investors over the last seven years, including the $1 billion the company has raised now.
Now, developments at CFS, plus rumblings from industry sources TechCrunch has spoken with in recent months, suggest that the startup might go public in the next two or three years.
One of those developments was the appointment of Lorence Kim as CFS’s new Chief Financial Officer this week. Kim’s previous stint as a CFO was at Moderna, a biotech which specializes in mRNA therapies, which he joined in 2014 and subsequently helped take public in December 2018. He stuck around another year-and-a-half before returning to biotech investing.
Kim said he sees “something very familiar” in CFS. “Fusion today is where mRNA was a decade ago: scientifically real, commercially yet-to-be-proven, and closer than the consensus thinks,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
The choice might seem unusual, but Kim isn’t the first fusion executive to come with a background in the biotech world: Eric Lander, who helped lead the Human Genome Project, co-founded Pacific Fusion and now serves as its CEO.
