Fusionality has raised a CHF 3 million pre-seed round to build its founding team in Lausanne and provide operations infrastructure for magnetic fusion devices. The round was co-led by Founderful and Playfair.
Fusionality’s approach to fusion operations
Fusionality develops integrated hardware and software solutions that let fusion companies operate, monitor and analyze their devices. The company says its products are designed to be transferable across devices with minimal customization, so that each subsequent deployment costs meaningfully less than the first.
Magnetic fusion devices use powerful magnets to confine a super-hot plasma, recreating on Earth the conditions found in stars. More than 30 privately funded companies worldwide, alongside publicly funded national and international programs, are building such devices. All face a common challenge: measuring plasma properties, turning those measurements into an understanding of the plasma state, and steering heating, fueling and magnet systems within milliseconds. Many organisations are rebuilding this operations infrastructure almost from scratch, which Fusionality aims to address.
Founders’ background and plans
The company was founded in 2026 by Federico Felici and Jonas Buchli. Felici completed a PhD in plasma physics at EPFL, served as an assistant professor at TU Eindhoven, returned to EPFL to lead control activities at its Swiss Plasma Center, and then spent two and a half years at Google DeepMind. Buchli is an electrical engineer who held a faculty position at ETH Zurich before joining Google DeepMind as a senior research scientist. The two met while teaching an AI to control EPFL’s TCV tokamak, a collaboration that led to a 2022 paper in Nature on magnetic control of tokamak plasmas through deep reinforcement learning.
The funding will be used to assemble the founding team in Lausanne—bringing together control engineers, computational physicists, plasma measurement specialists and software engineers—and to deliver the company’s first customer engagements.
