Twilio co-founder’s fusion power startup raises $450M from Bessemer and Alphabet’s GV

Inertia Enterprises, a fusion power startup co-founded by Twilio’s Jeff Lawson, has raised $450 million in a Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from GV (Alphabet’s venture arm) and others. The company aims to build one of the world’s most powerful lasers as the foundation for a grid-scale fusion power plant targeted for construction by 2030. Inertia’s technology builds on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), which has achieved controlled fusion reactions that release more energy than consumed. The startup’s approach uses inertial confinement fusion, where lasers compress fuel targets to trigger fusion, leveraging NIF’s design principles but focusing on commercial scalability and cost reduction. Inertia plans to develop a laser system capable of delivering 10 kilojoules of energy ten times per second, requiring 1,000 lasers firing on small, inexpensive fuel targets—significantly more efficient and cost-effective than NIF’s current setup