The global fusion sector is entering a new phase. In the past, fusion was primarily a scientific endeavor by national laboratories, universities, and government programs. Today, it is increasingly becoming an industrial and strategic priority. Private capital, public policy, and advanced manufacturing are beginning to converge around a common objective: transforming fusion from a scientific challenge into an engineering reality.
This convergence is already underway. Private fusion companies are attracting record levels of capital, where 56 fusion companies raised $4.48B in the past year. This is a 69% increase from 2025 and marks the highest annual total since tracking started in 2021, while governments are shifting from supporting fundamental research toward enabling commercialization through regulatory frameworks, demonstration roadmaps, public-private partnerships, and domestic supply-chain development. At AV, we have invested in multiple industrial-grade technologies, including communication systems, space-domain infrastructure, and advanced computing architectures over the past decade. Each of these sectors ultimately depends on the same underlying constraint: abundant, reliable, and resilient power. As these sectors continue to scale, energy, therefore, is not adjacent but core to our investment thesis. Today’s energy stack only partially addresses that need. Renewables are cheap and scalable, but intermittent. Solar and wind will continue to grow, but they require storage, transmission, and firming capacity to support 24/7 industrial loads. Fossil fuels are dispatchable, but not aligned with decarbonization of energy security. LNG and coal remain politically and economically exposed, especially for import-dependent countries. Fission provides baseload power, but faces safety perception, construction cost, waste, regulatory, and local acceptance challenges. These challenges are particularly urgent in places like Japan. The country is structurally energy-constrained and heavily dependent on imported fuels. Its energy self-sufficiency ratio was only 12.6% in FY2022, among the lowest in the G7. For Japan, energy is not only a climate issue. It is a question of industrial resilience, economic competitiveness, and national security. Disruptions to fuel imports, shipping routes, commodity prices, or regional stability can directly affect Japanese industry and policy. Fusion remains attractive for Japan. It offers a potential pathway toward energy that is clean, abundant, reliable, and less dependent on imported fuel. Japan revised its Fusion Energy Innovation Strategy in June 2025, bringing forward the target for fusion electricity demonstration from the 2050s to the 2030s. It outlines commercialization roadmaps, Cabinet-level coordination, public-private partnerships, domestic supply-chain development, expanded funding through organizations such as NEDO, JST, and deeper international collaboration. Japan is also unusually well positioned to pursue this opportunity. The country has decades of tokamak experience through JT-60SA, a major role in ITER-related manufacturing, and deep capabilities in superconducting magnets, gyrotrons, divertors, advanced materials, tritium systems, robotics, construction, and large-scale engineering. Its industrial base includes high-quality suppliers across precision manufacturing, power electronics, heavy machinery, nuclear technology, and complex infrastructure delivery. Yet these capabilities have historically remained distributed across universities, national research institutions, large corporations, engineering contractors, and component suppliers. What Japan has lacked is a private-sector-led, full-stack fusion company capable of integrating these assets into a commercial power platform. Starlight Engine was created to fill that gap. The company was established to lead FAST—Fusion by Advanced Superconducting Tokamak—a private-sector-led initiative targeting the demonstration of fusion power generation in Japan during the 2030s. Rather than building a single component, Starlight Engine is being developed as the project integrator connecting fusion science with plant engineering, industrial execution, regulation, financing, and ultimately commercial deployment. This matters because fusion is moving from physics to engineering. The next phase will not be won solely by achieving another plasma record. It will be won by organizations capable of converting scientific progress into an integrated, maintainable, financeable, licensable, and ultimately commerciallyviable power plant quickly. The company’s leadership is similarly structured around commercialization rather than research alone. Bringing fusion to market requires coordinating universities, industrial partners, governments, regulators, investors, utilities, local communities, and international stakeholders. Starlight Engine combines technical depth with business execution, policy engagement, and cross-sector coordination. It also benefits from the engineering heritage of Kyoto Fusioneering, whose experience in fusion plant systems provides a technical advantage that gives Starlight Engine a head start. The global competitive landscape is accelerating. Leading American companies have demonstrated significant progress in high-temperature superconducting magnets, commercialization strategies, and customer-oriented power development. China is rapidly expanding government-backed fusion infrastructure at industrial scale. As this landscape evolves, Japan needs more than world-class suppliers of individual components. It needs a collective force capable of organizing capabilities into a globally impactful fusion platform. Fusion remains one of the most ambitious engineering challenges. Commercialization will require sustained scientific progress, disciplined execution, and patient long-term capital. Yet the opportunity beyond the hardship is equally rewarding. A successful fusion industry could reshape global energy infrastructure, strengthen industrial resilience, and reduce strategic dependence on imported fuels. We are proud to support Starlight Engine as it works to help bring that future from Japan to the world.