Fuse, led by JC Btaiche, has signed agreements with national nuclear laboratories such as Los Alamos.
JC Btaiche
JC Btaiche, 24, raised $20 million and hired the former Iranian nuclear scientist and former Pentagon officials with a bold goal: using nuclear fusion to solve all our energy problems.
By David JeansForbes Staff
SSince the first hydrogen bomb tests in the 1950s, scientists have struggled to develop a practical fusion energy source that could mimic the reactions that power the sun and use it safely on Earth. The promise is revolutionary: an infinite supply of energy, far more powerful than fossil fuels, without the carbon pollution that comes with it.
Now, with the help of one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, a small team of former Pentagon and CIA officials is working toward that goal. In reality, that’s a long way off: The scientific consensus is that viable commercial fusion is a decade away, maybe two. But in the meantime, the company, called Fuse, has shorter-term plans: using fusion technology to develop radiation testing facilities that simulate the effects of nuclear weapons on machines. Fuse hopes to generate revenue from government contracts that can support its long-term research and development efforts—a business model that has enthused Silicon Valley investors like Buckley Ventures and serial entrepreneur Sky Dayton to the point of investing more than $20 million in the company.
Leading this unlikely team of military officials and scientists is JC Btaiche, a high school graduate who immigrated to North America from Lebanon in 2016 with the goal of solving one of the world’s toughest problems. He convinced investors and employees that private industry could do for commercial fusion what it did for spaceflight: accelerate progress by solving the problems the National Nuclear Security Administration (NSA) has spent $24 billion on developing a viable fusion reactor. “Fuse wants to be to the NNSA what SpaceX is to NASA,” the 24-year-old said. Forbes.
It all sounds a bit utopian. “A[fusion]power plant will require an Apollo-like program,” said Bjorn Hegelich, a fusion professor at the University of Texas at Austin, referring to the NASA program that put the first men on the moon. “It’s not going to be something that a single startup can do.”
And then there’s Btaiche himself, who, with no nuclear science background or even a college degree, is taking on such a formidable challenge with a fraction of the money that his rivals are funding. And yet investors are backing him. Fuse is currently in talks to raise an additional $20 million in a Series A funding round. After signing deals with Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the company is expected to generate $2 million in revenue this year, according to a pitch deck for the round. (Btaiche declined to discuss the nature of the deals; a spokesperson for Sandia and Los Alamos declined to comment.)
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“The best founders just have that kind of inevitability about them,” said Josh Buckley, whose eponymous venture capital firm invested in Fuse. Forbes“And I started to see JC regularly, over time, going through several brick walls.”
Btaiche’s timing is perfect. After a breakthrough in nuclear fusion at Lawrence Livermore last year, the Biden administration announced earlier this month that it was spending $180 million to boost fusion energy development, allocating an additional $46 million to public-private partnerships with several companies in the sector.
Fuse CEO JC Btaiche and chief engineer Vahid Damideh, previously one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists at the Atomic Energy Organization.
JC Btaiche
Among the government’s partners is Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Denver-based company that spun out of MIT and has raised more than $2 billion from investors including George Soros and Bill Gates. Seattle-based Zap Energy is also backed by Gates and energy giants Shell and Chevron, which have given the company more than $200 million. Both companies are working toward commercial fusion power. OpenAI’s Sam Altman is another player in the space, having personally invested $375 million in Helion, which estimates it can deploy a working fusion power plant by 2028; it signed an energy deal with Microsoft last year.
The industry is already fiercely competitive, but Fuse’s backers are optimistic about Btaiche’s idea of developing fusion technology alongside its radiation testing business. Btaiche “is amazingly strategic in his thinking and he’s built an incredible culture,” said Sean McKay, a retired Air Force veteran and colonel who oversaw foreign military sales and now runs Fuse’s government business. “That’s why I’m taking a risk.”
The company’s lead engineer is Vahid Damideh, a former top Iranian nuclear scientist at the Atomic Energy Organization, where he oversaw its national nuclear fusion project, he said. ForbesAt Fuse, he leads the development of its core products, Titan and Faeton, which the company touts as a way to prepare the U.S. arsenal for possible nuclear fallout.
Both tools use so-called pulse fusion to blast radiation at machines — satellites, for example — to simulate what would happen in the event of a nuclear attack. The company hopes to use the technology as the backbone of its ambitions to build fusion reactors and, eventually, harness fusion’s limitless energy potential to power space exploration. “This is the first time in history that the United States has two potential nuclear adversaries,” Btaiche said during a talk at the Reindustrialize defense technology conference last week. “This really puts us in a position where we need to build now.”
Btaiche met Damideh at a virtual conference on fusion technology in 2020. Damideh was living in Canada and working as a postdoctoral researcher at Ontario Tech University, after moving from Iran in 2013 to Malaysia to study fusion at several universities there. Having worked with students for much of his career, Damideh said he was drawn to the idealistic young entrepreneur. “JC told me, ‘I’m going to take everything else out of your life so you can just focus on science and technology,’” Damideh said. “I immediately joined him.”
Fuse’s team also includes advisers and executives from the Pentagon and the CIA, including Laura Thomas, the former CIA base chief in Afghanistan, who advises the company on government relations strategy. Of Damideh’s background in Iran, she said: “I don’t think it’s typical, but only in America do you find a team like this. We want the best people, and we also want people who care about the West or share the same values as the West.”
Btaiche grew up in Lebanon and became interested in the field through his father, who ran manufacturing plants but trained as a nuclear physicist. In high school, he realized that his dream of producing fusion energy wasn’t possible in Lebanon. So he booked a one-way flight to Canada at age 16, joining his older brother in Montreal (they obtained Canadian citizenship through his father). Once there, he often skipped school so he could attend physics classes at McGill University. “I was learning about the history of the universe and all the problems in the world today, and fusion is at the heart of all of those problems,” he said.
In 2019, while finishing high school, Btaiche was introduced to a family office that wanted to start a fusion company. With the idea of building a team of experts who could commercialize decades of fusion research, he convinced them to write his first check for $2.5 million and began working on the company’s first research facility in Montreal. Before long, “I was managing people whose kids were older than me,” he said.
Today, with about 30 employees, Fuse is building a new radiation testing facility in San Leandro, California, and looking to expand its engineering team. To recruit them, Btaiche’s message has evolved to echo the macho, pro-American ethos of other defense companies led by young founders (many of them based in El Segundo, California). Job applicants must be “determined to see the rings of Saturn and stand on the surface of Pluto,” Fuse’s website says, adding: “Bureaucracy and red tape are not for you. You’ve probably gotten in trouble for pushing the envelope.”
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