Thea Energy, a Kearny-based company, is advancing its fusion power goals with significant backing, including a recent fellowship from Amazon Web Services and the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence. A spinout from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Princeton University, Thea Energy focuses on commercializing stellarator fusion energy. Since its 2022 founding, the company has raised $30 million in investor funding and received additional non-dilutive funding from the U.S.

To build a fusion power plant, engineers are forced to make some difficult choices. Do they go with the simpler design and then, while in operation, force the plasma to behave so it doesn’t snuff itself out? Or do they opt for a complex design that’s challenging to build but leads to happier plasma?Or what if there was a way to do both?Thea Energy is hoping that “both” is the right answer. The startup is betting that software can supplant manufacturing precision in its quest to deliver reliable, inexpensive fusion power. It has recently raised a $20 million Series A, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Prelude Ventures led the round with participation from 11.2 Capital, Anglo American, Hitachi Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Mercator Partners, Orion Industrial Ventures and Starlight Ventures.There are two main approaches to fusion power: inertial confinement and magnetic confinement. The former made headlines at the end of 2022 for proving that net-positive fusion power isn’t just science fiction by using massive lasers to vaporize a fusion fuel pellet.Many startups, though, are using some variation of the former