The round was led by Azolla Ventures with participation from Overlay, the Mass Clean Energy Center, Neta Foundation, the Rothrock family, and P3A
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 22, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cambridge Heavy Industries, a developer of compact fusion machines, today emerged from stealth and announced its $6.2 million seed round. The company, led by co-founder and CEO Dr. Yun Kai and co-founders Raffi Freeman, Professor Keith Nelson, and Dr. Steve Kooi, will use the capital to construct the company’s first compact fusion reactor at its facility in Massachusetts. Specifically, this will include procurement of equipment including an ultrafast laser, optical components, neutron diagnostics and augmenting the team.
Cambridge Heavy Industries’ technology utilizes commercial lasers to generate extreme pressures and temperatures that create fusion-relevant conditions, enabling the production of rare isotopes through neutron bombardment and ultimately fusion power. Its compact dimensions enable weekly testing and upgrades (as opposed to the years-long R&D cycles of conventional fusion), and are reliant upon off-the-shelf equipment, requiring no customization. The company’s breakthrough in shockwave science enables a 400x higher compression efficiency compared to past laser-based fusion efforts with a fraction of the capital expenditure. Recently, Cambridge Heavy Industries’ prototype fusion machine – the size of just two dinner tables – achieved a level of pressure as high as the center of the earth (350 GPa) using only tens of millijoules of energy.