Lausanne-based startup Fusionality is building fusion control systems designed to be shared across the industry, having raised $3.7 million (CHF 3 million) in pre-seed funding from Founderful and Playfair to do it. The pitch is straightforward: roughly 80% of any fusion reactor’s control system is functionally identical to every other one, so why should each company build it from scratch?
That question came directly from the market. Co-founders Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli kept hearing the same frustration from fusion companies: nobody was selling control-system components, and nobody spoke the language of fusion. ‘We spent quite a lot of our time solving exactly the problems that our customers need to solve,’ Felici told TechCrunch. ‘It felt like the right time.’
A Spinout With Deep Roots in Plasma Physics
Fusionality is a spinout of EPFL’s Swiss Plasma Center, the Lausanne institute that houses one of Europe’s experimental tokamaks. The collaboration between the two founders goes back further than the company: Felici and Buchli first connected in 2018, when Felici attended a hackathon at Google DeepMind’s London headquarters and pitched his research group’s plasma magnetic-control problem to DeepMind scientists.
That meeting eventually produced a peer-reviewed study in Nature (vol. 602, pp. 414–419, February 2022), co-authored by Felici, Buchli, and colleagues, on magnetic control of tokamak plasmas using deep reinforcement learning. The paper has accumulated 1,579 citations as of the available record. That’s a reasonably credible research pedigree to build a startup on.
Felici serves as CEO, Buchli as CTO. The company was founded in 2026 and the pre-seed round was announced on 9 September 2026, according to Fusionality’s official news page, which also confirms the company previously received CHF 40,000 from Venture Kick before the larger raise.
Fusionality Fusion Control Systems as Modular Lego Blocks
The product vision is modular. Fusionality plans to develop a suite of control systems and simulation environments that fusion startups can adapt to their specific reactor designs, rather than building everything in-house. Felici describes them as Lego blocks: ‘We start with a few of these blocks and then we build out more.’
For now, the focus is on magnetic confinement fusion, the approach that uses powerful electromagnets to keep superheated plasma dense enough and hot enough to sustain a reaction. Companies such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Realta Fusion, Proxima Fusion, and Type One Energy are all developing this class of device. Felici said Fusionality will eventually extend its systems to other reactor types.
The addressable market is already taking shape. Tech Funding News reports that more than 30 private fusion companies currently require the kind of plasma software Fusionality is building. The pre-seed funding will go towards hiring control engineers, computational physicists, plasma measurement specialists, and software engineers in Lausanne, as well as securing the company’s first paying customers.
The team currently stands at seven people. Felici declined to specify which technologies the company is prioritising first, beyond the Lego-block analogy.
AI Helps, but Won’t Run the Whole Reactor
Given the founders’ backgrounds, the question of how much AI ends up inside these systems is worth asking. Felici’s answer is measured. AI will ‘play an important role in future control systems,’ he said, but it is not ready to manage an entire fusion reactor. ‘I wouldn’t be somebody who advocates for AI to take the role of controlling the entire fusion reactor.’ For now, it is more likely to ‘complement or enhance or optimize’ specific subsystems.
That’s a more cautious framing than you’d expect from a startup trying to raise money in an AI-hungry market. It’s also probably accurate: plasmas are genuinely fickle, and the stakes of a control failure are high enough that incremental AI integration beats an all-or-nothing bet.
Investors With Fusion-Adjacent Track Records
The two backers are not newcomers to deep-tech bets. Founderful, the Zurich-based fund founded in 2017 (formerly Wingman Ventures), has previously backed EPFL spin-out Isospec Analytics. Playfair has invested in UK fusion-isotope startup Astral Systems. Both investors have form in the fusion supply chain, which gives the round some logic beyond the headline number.
Fusionality is also a Venture Kick alumnus, the Swiss programme that helped validate the concept before the institutional money arrived.
Fusion Energy Base notes the raise as part of a broader build-out of operational infrastructure across the sector. The real test arrives when the first paying customers sign on and Fusionality has to prove those Lego blocks actually lock together under reactor conditions.
