Startups pitch fusion fuel, cleaner iron and a benchtop reactor as near-term businesses

Licube, which licensed technology from Hirosaki University in Japan, wants to purify lithium-6 from naturally occurring lithium. Fusion plants planned around deuterium and tritium face a tritium shortage; tritium is extremely rare, and the industry plans to breed it inside plants by surrounding reactors with lithium blankets. When neutrons strike lithium, it splits into helium and tritium. Lithium-6 captures neutrons far better than lithium-7, but makes up only about 7.5% of natural lithium, and separation capacity is limited today.

CEO Yohei Kiguchi told TechCrunch that if fusion comes online, lithium-6 could be a $50 billion market by 2040. Until then, Licube plans to use its purification technology for semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, fission reactors and spacecraft. Its process uses an electrolyzer: lithium is dissolved in a liquid on one side of a ceramic membrane, and as current flows, lithium-6 moves faster and can be drawn off. The target is at least 99.995% lithium-6 for fusion fuel-breeding systems. Kiguchi started Licube after visiting ITER in southern France and retiring from Enechange; he told TechCrunch he was too young to retire.

Helix Carbon is taking a different route to cutting industrial emissions. Co-founder and CEO David Brown told TechCrunch that decarbonizing steel without dealing with the blast furnace will not work. The company does not propose replacing blast furnaces, which use coke to produce carbon monoxide that strips oxygen from iron ore and releases large amounts of CO2. Instead, Helix uses an electrolyzer to turn waste CO2 back into carbon monoxide and recycle it into the furnace.

Helix says its electrolyzer can handle a blast furnace’s entire exhaust stream, unlike most electrolyzers that need purified, concentrated CO2. Injecting carbon monoxide lets iron producers use less coke. Brown said estimates vary: some papers suggest as much as 90% of coke can be eliminated, while others suggest 30% to 40%. Helix proposes replacing 33% of coke, which it says would save $14 per ton of iron. Brown said margins in the industry are thin. The iron and steel industries are a combined $2 trillion market, according to Grand View Research, but equipment lasts so long that change is slow; some blast furnaces have operated for more than 100 years. Helix plans to seek early revenue from specialty chemicals, using waste streams on site without first capturing CO2.

Cambridge Heavy Industries has been operating in stealth out of a small lab near MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. CEO Yun Kai told TechCrunch the company purposely built a small modular reactor that fits on a benchtop because small size makes everything easier. The design allows 50 to 80 experiments, or shots, per day, and data from those experiments will feed AI-driven simulations to optimize the design. The startup recently raised a $6.2 million seed round led by Azolla Ventures, with participation from Overlay, Neta Foundation, P3A, MassCEC and the Rothrock family.

Cambridge Heavy’s reactor uses lasers to compress a fuel target, an inertial confinement approach similar to the experiment that showed controlled fusion can produce more power than it consumes. But it minimizes the number of lasers. Two main lasers drive ignition; one is split into multiple beam lines that deliver light in concentric rings. The rings hit a flat, round target successively from the outside in, starting a compression wave and then boosting it at timed intervals. A laser then fires on the center, generating heat and a magnetic field; with enough pressure and heat, fusion occurs. Kai said the design generates high pressures with relatively low laser power. The concept came from the lab of Keith Nelson, a chemist at MIT, where researchers used laser pulses to study materials under extreme conditions and found they were approaching fusion-ready conditions.

In about a decade, Cambridge Heavy plans to develop a power plant from the concept, though it would require scaling up to about the size of two basketball courts—larger than the benchtop prototype but smaller than other fusion plants. Before that, it plans to use smaller devices to make tritium, a rare hydrogen isotope that nearly all fusion plants under development will need. Tritium sells for around $30,000 per gram, and only about 40 kilograms exist today. One recent study predicts the fusion power industry will be short by about 28 kilograms in 2054, worth about $840 million at current prices. Fusion startups are designing fuel systems that would make reactors largely self-sufficient in tritium, but Kai said that could take up to ten years, giving Cambridge Heavy a potential revenue window.

Editor's Summary

Licube and Helix Carbon used TechCrunch Disrupt to pitch lithium-6 enrichment for fusion fuel and a blast-furnace carbon-recycling process, while Cambridge Heavy Industries detailed a tabletop laser fusion device. The three startups are targeting near-term markets including semiconductors, specialty chemicals and tritium while commercial fusion power remains years away. Cambridge Heavy’s $6.2 million seed round and Helix’s projected $14-per-ton savings illustrate how investors and industrial users are backing pieces of the fusion and steel supply chains.