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The basics:

• Thea Energy, a Princeton spinout, works to advance stellarator fusion for clean power
• Company secured AWS Compute for Climate fellowship support
• Raised $30M in funding plus U.S. Department of Energy awards
• Plans underway for Eos prototype

After getting a jolt from one of the biggest corporations in the world, Kearny-based Thea Energy is progressing on its goal of making fusion a commercially viable clean energy solution.

Named after Thea, the Greek goddess of light and radiance, the three-year-old venture recently wrapped up a months-long fellowship offered by Amazon Web Services and the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence designed to help researchers, startups, nonprofits and public sector organizations build proofs-of-concept that can use advanced computing to address environmental challenges.

A spinout of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University, Thea Energy aims to build upon research and technology developed at these institutions to commercialize stellarator fusion energy. Considered a rising player in the U.S. fusion space, the company has raised $30 million in total investor funding since its 2022 founding. In addition, Thea Energy has also received other non-dilutive funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, including as an awardee in the inaugural phase of the milestone-based fusion development program.

As one of eight entities selected in November 2024 for the second cohort of the Compute for Climate fellowship, Thea received resources, support and collaboration opportunities to support its fusion energy research & development. Altogether, the program awarded up to $1.5 million in AWS cloud credits and technical guidance for fellows to develop their AI/cloud-based solutions.

Founded in 2023, Compute for Climate seeks to accelerate innovation by offering computing power for projects related to emissions reductions, carbon capture, renewable energy, climate modeling and environmental modeling.

In addition to being part of Amazon’s broader sustainability and climate pledge to become net-zero carbon by 2040, the company says the initiative highlights a larger tech strategy of advancing clean energy innovation by backing startups working on next-generation decarbonization technologies.

For the recently announced third round of the program, AWS and IRCAI expanded it to select 23 startups and offer a total of $4 million on cloud credit funding.

‘Desperately’ seeking solution

Lisbeth Kaufman, founder and head of AWS’ climate tech startups business development team and co-chair of the fellowship, said, “We recognize that the climate crisis is a huge challenge for humanity, and the world desperately needs solutions, and these climate tech startups are in the forefront of building those solutions. So, we set up this fellowship to help those startups move more quickly in building climate tech solutions … that’s the goal behind all of this.”

By working with the companies via the fellowship program, Kaufman said, “I feel like I’m getting a vision of what the future can look like and all of these incredible solutions … And you start to get a picture of a future where we’ve got abundant energy that unlocks innovation, there’s food security around the world and people are ultimately living healthier, happier lives instead of the doom and gloom of the climate crisis.”

According to Kaufman, some of the most impactful projects include an AI-powered fabric inspection technology from Smartex in Portugal that can spot defects in textiles, saving on wasted fabric and wasted money. There’s also a chemical-free, solar-powered autonomous robotics platform developed by Aigen in Washington state to accelerate the transition to regenerative agriculture.

“It’s been really exciting to see these concrete solutions or examples of how AI can help us address the climate crisis,” she said. “AI is very good at speeding things up and doing things that just weren’t possible just a few years ago.”

Fusion is heating up

Fusion has long been seen as a promising route for clean energy but has been limited by computational complexity of the process.

With over $9.7 billion invested into fusion energy R&D since 2021, the sector is coming closer than ever to realizing the promise of creating affordable, zero-emission energy to decarbonize industries and communities, according to the Fusion Industry Association. Of that figure, $2.6 billion was raised in the last year alone. The majority – roughly $8.9 billion – comes from private sources, but public funding increased 84% to nearly $800 million in the 12 months leading up to July 2025.

As the field evolves out of academic labs and governmental research programs and into the commercially driven, globally competitive energy sector, Thea Energy is building on recent breakthroughs to create a faster, simpler approach to providing an abundant source of clean power for a sustainable future.

Specifically, the company is leveraging advances in computation and controls to reinvent the stellarator, a scientifically mature form of magnetic fusion technology that was originally invented in 1951 at Princeton University.

Thea Energy is currently designing Eos, a proprietary integrated system based on its planar coil stellarator architecture the company hopes will produce fusion neutrons at scale and in a steady state. Eos – who was the daughter of goddess Thea and the personification of dawn – is expected to be completed by 2030.

Thea Energy co-founder and CEO Brian Berzin said, “We’re a clean tech company, so we’re focusing on commercializing fusion and a way to make energy kind of similar to how the sun works. But the codes that are required for us to simulate and understand these reactions … they’re really, really complicated … So, via the Compute for Climate fellowship, we were able to set up a program in collaboration with Amazon to help build out a software suite and a platform that could leverage AWS.”

AWS is the groundbreaking platform of the world that allows anyone with a click of a button to sign on remotely and to access some of the most cutting-edge, largest computing assets that humanity knows.
– Brian Berzin, Thea Energy co-founder and CEO

“Prior to this and with collaborations with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and some other national labs, we had access to a couple of computers across the country to utilize to crunch those numbers. However, they’re limited in their scale and allocations and just what we can do with them,” he said.

“AWS is the groundbreaking platform of the world that allows anyone with a click of a button to sign on remotely and to access some of the most cutting-edge, largest computing assets that humanity knows. So, this collaboration allowed us to work with Amazon to set up, from the ground level up, a framework for us to take these codes, these packages, these tools that our teams of Ph.Ds. have been working on for their entire careers and port them over for the first time to a really scalable architecture and scalable platform that is AWS,” he said.

“That was what the program focused on, and that’s something that we now actually have up and running. So, we now work with AWS as a typical client-vendor relationship to utilize these tools and to utilize these resources that we helped to build with Amazon during the program,” Berzin explained.

Power play

“Fusion is how stars work. It is star power. And, if you consider the universe that we live in, it’s the largest source of energy out there. So, it takes the lightest elements, primarily hydrogen, and fuses them together. And that’s the reaction that powers the light that goes into solar panels and that goes to support photosynthesis. It really is the source of all life and energy. However, to do it outside of a star — it’s very difficult. You have to make those intense conditions and intense temperatures like the center of the sun,” explained Berzin.

“In New Jersey, for quite a few decades at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, this has been one of the major hubs for fusion research in the world … That’s where our concepts in this architecture called the stellarator, a magnetic form of fusion energy, was actually first invented,” he said. “And during the period from the 1950s until now, that has been the fundamental scientific research and development … that have allowed us to verify the physics and allowed us to verify the theory and hardware. That is what allowed Thea Energy to spin out of the lab a couple of years ago.”

Berzin said, “There’s some parts of this world that even if solar and wind and battery storage continue to be adopted at scale, require more and different types of energy. Fusion plays in as it can serve as base load power, it can serve as industrial heat and it can also make cheap electricity. So, that kind of fits the bill for everyone.”

“Across the country, but specifically New Jersey, you’ll have adopters that are more utility-like in nature,” he said. “And then you may have a little bit more specific use cases where you have an entity such as the ones … who want to power a data center to support a wide variety of use cases, from training AI models to the storage of cloud data,” he said.

Learn more from Thea Energy’s co-founders:

#Fusion is the future of the world’s energy supply, and this team is working hard to make it happen with an approach that simplifies the construction and maintenance of the #stellarator.

🎥 See what we’ve been working on. pic.twitter.com/o1thdQGrPQ

— Thea Energy (@TheaEnergy) June 18, 2025

“There are a lot of different types of entities out there that need power. But an interesting stat that’s reflective of the past couple of years here in the United States, especially even the summer, we’re hitting new records for energy demand,” he explained. “As the use cases for data centers, AI, etc., continue to grow – as well as the electrification of our lives – you only need more power. Over the next 20 years … the electricity and overall energy demands are forecast to grow quite dramatically. That’s a lot of power and it is a lot of different types of solutions, including the ones we’ve talked about and renewables, including fusion, that ultimately work together to satisfy the demand.”

Changing the geopolitical landscape

Berzin added, “Another cool part about fusion is because our source of fuel is hydrogen, we don’t have what can often be described or thought of as the messy geopolitics of energy … Since you don’t need natural resources, you can manufacture energy without those limitations. So, that allows you to actually have an architecture of power generation mechanism that I think will truly change the geopolitical landscape for the better as well.”

Kaufman said fusion energy is an important focus area for the fellowship.

“We recognize that there’s a huge energy challenge. Energy is one of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. And at the same time, the world’s demand and need for energy is growing rapidly,” she said. “Fusion, in particular, offers a really impactful solution on both of those fronts: It’s a carbon free, abundant, low cost energy source with none of the nuclear byproducts. It has this potential to solve so many problems.”

“The whole fusion industry is in this R&D phase where they’re rapidly working on getting fusion technology to a point where it’s ready for commercialization. We think it’s a huge opportunity for the world and that translates into a huge opportunity for AWS, as well. These are customers that are going to be enormous companies, and we want to support them and help them build and grow. So, we’re super excited to have Thea in the fellowship,” Kaufman said.

EM-powered solutions

However, Berzin said, “There’s still a ton of work, as there is across the country, that focuses on the scientific backbone that underlies our technologies. Over the past decade, there have been a number of large-scale systems that have actually made fusion conditions … And the underlying physics of fusion has really dramatically improved to show its feasibility that we on earth can make fusion conditions.”

Berzin said that’s prompted a wave of startups interested in “commercializing that technology in a form that functions as a power plant that can be built across the country, that can be built to power homes, to power data centers and a number of different other uses for electricity ultimately.”

“That’s what we’re focused on now. That’s what the 70 people who work at Thea Energy are focused on building – a power plant architecture – and that’s where we take these physics codes and computational resources and via the AWS platform are actually optimizing a system that will power homes,” he said.

During the fellowship, Berzin said Thea Energy “worked very, very closely with AWS and some very technical brilliant people on that side to really help us build out our software optimization suite and really a next level of tools that can be scaled into the cloud,” he said. “We received some time with Amazon and some services to help us go through that setup period to get a stack in place that we could utilize to actually run the simulations going forward.”

He went on to describe the fellowship as “a really important moment for the entire industry.”

“There are numerous national labs and there are numerous academic programs working on accelerator technology, which is one of the best studied approaches to fusion energy. Unfortunately, because of that, it means that the development of it occurring over 70 years is oftentimes mismatched,” he explained.

“This program allowed us in this entire industry to now have a more cohesive set of codes where things are integrated, things are connected and things are ultimately built on a platform that can scale to the future — rather than being local to someone’s single core processor on their desktop computer,” Berzin said. “So, the scalability and applicability of the work that came from the AWS collaboration is a game changing moment for this stellar community and fusion.

“In the next couple of years, we’re very excited to continue to scale the manufacturing, the R&D and the integrated system exercises that we’re working on now. I think we’ll have some interesting stuff to announce in the next year as we expand our footprint and then as we choose a site for the integrated system,” he said.

‘A very brilliant approach’

Kaufman said, “We were really impressed by Thea. They have a very brilliant approach to fusion energy, making the accelerator more scalable. Basically, they’re shifting the complexity of these accelerators from the hardware to software. And that’s particularly exciting for us. We, with our cloud services, hope we are already having a big impact on the software side.”

“They’re leveraging our high-performance computing and our artificial intelligence to build their technology. And then we hope at some point they can help power our technology. There’s the potential that they could help provide the energy for AWS and Amazon’s operations. And then there could be a really cool flywheel situation where we’re each helping each other and we can kind of spin that flywheel faster and drive innovation,” she said.

Kaufman continued, “We’re still working very deeply with them now. They have even more stuff that they need to build with the cloud and with our high-performance computing and our AI. So, we’re super excited to continue working with them … and what they’re doing is just really cool. Fusion is historically not very scalable. It’s these very bespoke, complex hardware, physical installations. And when equipment is complex, it’s hard to scale. So, they’re simplifying the equipment – they have a single planar magnet – and then they’re shifting the complexity into the software. And, as we all know, software is infinitely scalable.”

Rising star

Earlier this year, Thea Energy celebrated the opening of a headquarters at Kearny Point designed and built specifically for the company’s rapid prototyping and testing of core technologies. The 15,000-square-foot space includes multiple labs for high-field magnet manufacturing and operation as well as office space.

A Somerset County native with background as both an operator and investor in areas spanning deep tech, venture capital, private equity and investment banking, Berzin wanted to establish Thea Energy’s base in New Jersey because the state is “within a commute radius that can serve many different archetypes of life.

“If you look at our company and the employees that we have — some physicists, some engineers, some technicians, some operations and strategy professionals. There are many different types of people. I think what’s really cool about our culture is the different archetypes that we’re able to bring in effectively to work together,” he said.

Berzin said, “At this point in time, our labs are full with 70 employees. We’re actively looking to expand, and we’ll extend our footprint significantly — doubling, tripling, quadrupling the size of our offices and labs. Later this year, we also will continue to work with AWS to take this software suite and this infrastructure that we set up and continue to utilize it for years to come and increasing scale as we ultimately work to optimize the system configuration that we’re going to build. And then we’re going to take all this hard-earned knowledge and R&D from building things within our labs and put it all together in constructive device that makes fusion energy.”

Within the next year, Thea Energy expects to pick a location for its large-scale integrated stellarator, Eos.

“We’re looking at sites in New Jersey, but we’re for sure looking further beyond that because we have to figure out where is the right place to attract that talent and where’s the right place to build out these technologies. So, we very much hope that we can do it in New Jersey, but we can’t quite say yet,” said Berzin. He went on to add, “… As I look to the next two years of growth, I think it’s similarly important for us to make sure we’re putting the company in the right place to attract talent.”

Additional funding

Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy selected Thea Energy to receive three awards through the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy program.

The funding, which is intended to secure U.S. leadership in emerging fusion technologies and innovation, will support collaborations with the DOE’s Plasma Physics Laboratory and Columbia University. Altogether, the program gave $6.1 million across 20 nationally based public-private partnerships for fusion research.

Thea Energy co-founder and Chief Technology Officer David Gates remarked, “These awards are focused on faster processes, improved workflows, and important plasma analysis, ultimately leading to milestone execution. With one award, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s first-of-a-kind, high-temperature superconductor (HTS) inspection equipment will help pave the way for high-fidelity magnet performance predictions with significantly reduced operational overhead. With a second award, we will apply artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to accelerate plasma modeling, where traditional simulations are historically time intensive. In a third award with Columbia University, Thea Energy will further analyze the plasma behavior of Eos, our large-scale stellarator that will de-risk our fusion power plant, Helios.”

As for the biggest challenges Thea Energy faces, Berzin said it’s the fact that everything is “first-of-a-kind activities.”

“We’re doing frontier technology … There was no instruction manual and that is, for sure, daunting. However, that’s I think what drives all of us … and it is something that we’re excited to do every single day. We get to create something new that is just supremely rewarding, and it allows us to rethink, redo, reshape and find better ways to do things,” he said. “That’s where we’ve had a great deal of success thus far. But it means that there’s a lot of work to do ahead of us.”

We’re doing frontier technology … There was no instruction manual and that is, for sure, daunting. However, that’s I think what drives all of us.
– Brian Berzin, Thea Energy co-founder and CEO

Berzin also praised the team at Thea Energy for its efforts so far.

“The progress that we have made within a short period of time is pretty crazy – even for me to say – I’ve worked with a number of startups over my career. This one has just another level of work ethic and efficiency that I think a lot of people are working on something that is truly groundbreaking and that is great motivation and drive for us to have just a real deep commitment to this, to wanting to put fusion energy on the grid,” he said.

“And that drive has again allowed us to move very quickly and very efficiently to the point that I think we’re just immensely proud of the work to date. … [W]e’ve been very transparent about the milestones we’ve achieved, and similarly looking forward to executing on this next wave of milestones of tech development in the integrated system that show credibly across the industry and to our communities around us that we’re ready to put fusion on the grid and that it can be done so safely to power our lives for the future,” he said.

Editor’s note: This story was updated at 11:30 a.m. EST Oct. 7, 2025, to note that plans are in the works to pick a location for Thea Energy’s large-scale integrated stellarator, Eos, not Helios.