Everett-based fusion startup Zap Energy continues to land major funding.
The company disclosed in a Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has raised $130 million. A Zap Energy spokesperson said the company couldn't provide more information at this time.
The latest funding round builds off a $160 million Series C round Zap Energy raised in 2022. The 7-year-old company also received $5 million from the Department of Energy in May of 2023.
"In terms of what our main goal is, at least right now, it's getting these fusion cores onto the grid. So in the same place that you would use a coal furnace and a power plant, you could use a fusion device instead," AJ Kantor, Zap Energy's vice president of operations, said at the time of the 2022 raise.
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Zap Energy, like other fusion companies, wants to create carbon-free energy by using heat to force atomic particles to collide and release energy. The company uses what is known in physics as a "Z-pinch," or passing current through plasma to create a magnetic field around the plasma, rather than other approaches to fusion energy that rely on giant magnets. The aim is to produce energy more cheaply and require smaller reactors.
Fusion energy, however, has long proved elusive in science. According to the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, nuclear fusion reactors hit temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius, or 10 times hotter than the center of the sun, and making a plant to withstand the heat and pressure while producing energy is a major challenge.
In June of last year, Zap Energy acquired assets from Italian capacitor manufacturer ICAR, which dissolved in 2021, for an undisclosed amount. The purchase was to help the company bring manufacturing in-house for capacitors, which store and quickly discharge electricity and are key to Zap Energy's technology. At the time of the acquisition, Zap Energy had more than 100 employees.
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