The future of energy does not arrive with fireworks. It hums in a lab in Madison, Wisconsin, where superconducting magnets whisper at temperatures that would make winter blush.
Realta Fusion just secured a $9.5M growth capital facility from Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. Debt, not equity. Strategic, not flashy. The kind of capital you take when you know exactly what you are building and you do not feel like explaining it twice.
Congratulations to Kieran Furlong, MBA, CEO and Co-Founder, and to the deep bench of scientific assassins beside him: Cary Forest, PhD, CSO and Co-Founder, Plasma Physics; Jay Anderson, PhD, Co-Founder, Plasma Heating and Stability; Ben Lindley, PhD, Co-Founder, Blanket Design; and Oliver Schmitz, PhD, Co-Founder, Plasma Facing Components. This is what happens when professors stop publishing papers and start publishing pressure.
Realta Fusion is not chasing grid-scale headlines. They are engineering CoSMo fusion, compact, scalable, modular systems designed to deliver on-site industrial heat and power. Data centers. Chemical processing. Metal recycling. Remote mining. The places where energy is not a slogan, it is oxygen. Magnetic mirror confinement, high temperature superconducting magnets, plasma physics forged at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under ARPA-E funding. This is not science fair stuff. This is industrial choreography.
Before this facility, there was a $36M Series A led by Future Ventures, with Mayfield, GSBackers, SiteGround, Avila VC, and continued conviction from Khosla Ventures, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and TitletownTech. Before that, a $12M seed. Add it up and you see the rhythm: validate the physics, design the Anvil prototype, align simulations with reality, then scale with discipline.
Here is the part founders should underline. Realta Fusion did not raise on vibes. They raised on data. On experiments that proved magnetic mirrors could hold their own. On a team whose titles read like a plasma physics syllabus. When you derisk the science, capital stops asking if and starts asking how much.
For data centers staring down power constraints, for heavy industry trying to decarbonize without shutting down, CoSMo is more than a clever name. It hints at something cosmic yet local. Fusion that does not sit on the horizon but next to the facility gate. Heat where heat is needed. Power where uptime is sacred.
Energy has always been about control. Control of fire. Of steam. Of the atom. Realta Fusion is betting that control of plasma in a compact magnetic mirror will be the next chapter. Not loud. Not theatrical. Just relentless engineering, backed by capital that understands patience.
When fusion moves from experiment to infrastructure, the companies that treated physics like a product roadmap will be the ones still standing. And in Madison, the magnets are already humming.
