Company

We are building the world’s best shot at abundant, clean energy in Grenoble, France.

Our values

Environmental, societal good

We focus on planetary problems and do our utmost to bring solutions and value to society and the environment.

Our final objective is the energy source that will directly or indirectly address 15 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Our commitment to the planet is even in our logo: magenta like bougainvillaea flowers, deep blue like the sea and turquoise like the paws of the blue footed booby in the Galapagos.

Speed

We quickly jump from imagination to realization without fiddling with what might delay delivering fusion and its spinoffs.

Then we push hard and smart, animated by the urgency of our mission and reactivity to new information. Of the proverbial “on time, on specs, on budget”, time is our strongest drive, as several problems must be solved on time -climate change being a dramatic example. We decouple time from specs and budget by means of deep tech inventions.
They say fusion is like a marathon. We see it as several sprints, some in series, others parallelizable, run by a team.
Finally, speed is high and ever increasing: 1% acceleration every day means after a year you’ll be 1.01^218=8.75 times faster. And if in a year the team grows by 3x… well, we’ll let you do the maths.

Simplicity

We make things as simple as they can possibly be.

This is true for stellarators, HTS and many other things. What we do needs to work well here and now, not perfectly wherever and whenever. That’s why we start simple, build, test, and add layers of complexity only when needed, according to the inductive method. We isolate the problem, define a metric, brainstorm on options, converge on a decision.

Fantastic realism

We use the creative and the logical sides of the brain (in Renaissance spirit) to imagine a scientifically sound but nearly magic reality, at the frontier of what is physically possible. Then we build it.

Then we test it, learn, understand, face new problems and resourcefully imagine/build new solutions. We go into the lab and out of the lab and repeat the cycle until ideal and real converge. Our ingenuity is economically constrained; our risks are calculated (left side, right side). We make things never done before, which requires venturing outside our -or anybody’s- comfort and competence zone. Setbacks are an inevitable part of this journey and do not scare us from trying: a failure is just Nature telling us how to render our technologies and products fantastic.

Constructive interference
& unified force

We aim for pre-decision diversity and post-decision unity.

The collective creative process balances cross-fertilization and specialization. It’s like placing sources at specific locations, to maximize constructive interference at the observation point. Multidisciplinarity and internationalism make us constructively interfere and enjoy the work atmosphere. According to a Physics theory all interactions are different manifestations of the same force, and at high energy they are indistinguishable. We want to be a unified force.

A brief history

In July 2019 Renaissance Fusion was still an idea, presented at an event in New York and a conference in Milan. In August, Renaissance’s Francesco Volpe was joined by co-founder Martin Kupp.

The two brainstormed on possible European locations for the company and instantly fell in love with Grenoble, with its top international laboratories and beautiful natural scenery. In July 2020 the company was officially created, in March 2021 it received its first angel investments and shortly thereafter Diego Cammarano joined as the first employee.

The company received accolades in start-up competitions. By August 2021 it had outgrown its original seven-desk office and moved into a 900 m², two-story building. Collaborations began with institutes in France, Italy, Portugal and the USA.

Between March and April 2022, Renaissance filed 11 patent families on high-temperature superconductors and liquid metals. That sparked a wave of seminars, webinars, and presentations at conferences, like the April meeting of the American Physical Society.

In June 2022 Renaissance Fusion closed a
15 M€ Seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital

September 2022 saw the first reduced-scale liquid metal experiments. The design of a Physical Vapour Deposition machine for disruptive HTS manufacturing was completed shortly thereafter, with the goal to build it in-house as soon as possible. A liquid metal loop proved flowing liquid walls in a cylinder in 2023.

Our investors include

Why Grenoble

We wanted to base the company in Europe to stay close to 40% of talent in fusion. Besides, France is quickly becoming a startup nation, is eager on nuclear innovations and has some of the best mathematicians in the world.

Grenoble has a unique ecosystem of national and international labs (ESRF, ILL, CEA Leti, CNRS), large companies (Air Liquide, STMicroelectronics), deep-tech start-ups (Aledia, Verkor) and energy actors (InnoEnergy, Schneider Electric, EDF). Cadarache (ITER, CEA) is a 3 hour drive and other technological hubs like Geneva, Lausanne, Turin, Saclay and Paris are also strategically close.

While not a fusion city, Grenoble is a center of excellence for fusion-enabling technologies: here René Moreau founded his famous liquid metal research group, a tradition continued today by SIMAP. STMicroelectronics, Soitec, Minatec and a multitude of growing start-ups drive Grenoble’s world-famous semiconductor sector. Some of their film-deposition techniques can be transferred to our superconductors.

Grenoble is a “magnetic city” since Néel’s Nobel Prize winning studies and home to some of the strongest magnets in the world (LNCMI-G). And lastly, Grenoble hosts two world-class neutron sources (ILL, LPSC), which are essential to fusion material testing.

Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) ranks in the world top 50 in Physics, Metallurgical Engineering and Mathematics and attracts talented students, who often remain to further their careers. The beautiful surroundings and laid back, family-friendly, outdoor lifestyle do the rest. Grenoble lies in a Y-shaped valley in the middle of three massifs: Chartreuse, Vercors and Belledonne. Renaissance Fusion is located at the foot of the Vercors and is naming its stellarator Chartreuse (in line with the tradition of naming stellarators after mountains like Matterhorn and Wendelstein).

There’s something in the air in Grenoble.

It hosted stellarator research in the 1970’s, when stellarators were just ideas ahead of their time, before supercomputers, advanced manufacturing and HTS. In addition, Grenoble was one of the birthplaces of hydroelectricity in the 1870’s. We are committed to make it one of the birthplaces of fusion electricity in the early 2030’s.

We shined as a start-up