TL;DR

SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history, pricing 555.6 million shares at $135 each for a $1.77 trillion valuation. Japanese retail investors bought $2.2 billion of the offering through Mizuho, Rakuten, and SBI.

SpaceX begins trading on Nasdaq today under the ticker SPCX after raising $75 billion in the largest initial public offering ever completed. The previous record holder, Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing, raised $29.4 billion, making SpaceX’s offering roughly 2.5 times larger.

A regulatory filing on Friday confirmed that Japanese investors accounted for $2.2 billion of the total, purchasing 16.3 million Class A shares, or about 3% of the offering. Japan was one of a handful of countries outside the United States, alongside Australia, Canada, and parts of Europe, where retail buyers had direct access to the shares.

How the Japan tranche worked

Mizuho Financial Group’s US investment banking unit is one of 23 underwriters on the deal. It ran the Japanese allocation through its local brokerage and two online platforms, Rakuten Securities and SBI Securities.

SpaceX initially targeted $2 billion from Japanese investors but raised the ceiling to $2.5 billion after demand surged. The final $2.2 billion makes it the largest first-time share sale in Japan since JX Advanced Metals’ IPO last year.

The global picture

Total investor demand reached approximately $250 billion, making the offering nearly four times oversubscribed. BlackRock alone reportedly placed a $5 billion order. Goldman Sachs led the 23-bank underwriting syndicate, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase among the book-running managers.

At the $135 per share price, SpaceX’s fully diluted valuation sits at approximately $1.77 trillion, making it the seventh-largest listed company in the United States, above Tesla’s market capitalisation of roughly $1.6 trillion. If underwriters exercise the full over-allotment option, total proceeds could reach $86.25 billion.

What SpaceX actually is now

SpaceX is no longer just a rocket company. After absorbing Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI in an all-stock transaction in February 2026, it became a conglomerate spanning reusable rockets, satellite internet, and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Its S-1 filing disclosed $18 billion in consolidated revenue for 2025, alongside a net loss of $4.9 billion. Starlink, the satellite internet division, generated $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion in operating profit, accounting for 61% of total sales and all of the company’s profitability. The xAI segment recorded a $6.35 billion operating loss.

Musk’s grip on voting power

Musk holds approximately 42% of SpaceX’s equity but controls roughly 82% of its votes through a dual-class share structure in which his Class B shares carry disproportionate voting rights. That gives him unilateral authority to elect or remove a majority of the board.

The S-1 prospectus lists 849.5 million Class A shares and 5.57 billion Class B shares, a structure that ensures public shareholders have minimal governance influence regardless of their economic stake.

Who gets rich

The IPO is expected to mint roughly 4,000 millionaires among SpaceX’s workforce, including engineers, cooks, and administrative staff who received equity as part of their compensation. SpaceX set aside up to 5% of shares for employees and their associates.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX spent two decades as a private company, funding its operations through government contracts, private equity rounds, and Starlink revenue. The IPO marks the first time ordinary investors can buy shares directly.

The flags

SpaceX is unprofitable on a GAAP basis, with the xAI segment responsible for the $4.9 billion net loss. Whether Starlink’s profits can scale fast enough to offset xAI’s capital consumption is unresolved.

Musk’s 82% voting control means public shareholders are effectively along for the ride on all strategic decisions, including future acquisitions and capital allocation. The $1.77 trillion valuation implies growth rates no company has ever sustained at this scale, as Fortune has noted, and the xAI integration adds execution risk that did not exist when SpaceX was purely a launch and satellite business.

In India, consumers receive a lot of calls every day, ranging from spam and scams to delivery people and financial service companies trying to contact them. There are apps like Truecaller and the government’s Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) system to identify who is calling, but knowing the name of the caller is often not enough. That is why Equal AI is creating an assistant that can receive calls on your behalf, gather information, and tell you why someone is calling.

The app is currently available on Android, and since its launch last year, it has grown to more than a million monthly active users and over 300,000 daily active users, it says. The app screens the call and displays the reason someone is calling you.

The dialer shows quick reply options like “Leave the delivery near the door” or “Give it to the neighbor,” and the AI reads them back to the caller. You can also type a custom message for the AI to read out. The app records the call, and users can see the recording and transcription history with a summary in the app.

Equal AI said today it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital with participation from Think Investments and Valiant Fund. Individual investors include Indian fintech PhonePe’s founder Sameer Nigam, Zubin Bharti Mittal from Airtel Family Office, Skyflow AI co-founder Anshu Sharma, Meta India and Southeast Asia’s VP Sandhya Devanathan, and CtrlS Datacenters’ Chairman Sridhar Pinnapureddy. With the new funding, the company has raised over $42 million to date.

The round is structured in three tranches, with the startup carrying a different valuation at each stage depending on whether it hits predetermined targets — a growing but still uncommon approach in which startups sell equity at different prices within the same round. The structure has an unusual quirk: it lets a startup advertise the highest valuation achieved, even if the bulk of the equity was sold at a lower one. Equal AI declined to provide its specific valuations.

The startup was founded by Keshav Reddy in 2022. Reddy comes from the family behind Indian conglomerate GVK, which has holdings across infrastructure, energy, and healthcare. Equal started as a data-sharing company for financial services and still offers data for financial analysis and know your customer (KYC) verification services for employers.

“We always wanted to be a customer-facing company, and with Equal AI, the first use case we launched was a call assistant because we realized users get a ton of calls for financial services or job openings. If you are buying car insurance, you might get 20 calls over a week, and that is hard to tackle for a human,” founder Reddy told TechCrunch about why the company started there.

The app currently only screens unknown calls, but the company is planning to introduce the ability to screen calls from known numbers too. The company also wants the AI assistant to take proactive action on a user’s behalf — such as texting a delivery person your address (with consent) or making outbound calls to book appointments. The startup said it is also working on an iOS version of the app and a paid subscription tier with more features.

Equal AI is using a mix of speech recognition, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and speech generation models with its own orchestration layer. English support matters, but consumers in India often speak in their native language or blend multiple languages in a single sentence — a phenomenon called code-mixing. Equal AI says it has built support for over 10 languages with this in mind.

The startup has stiff competition. Google and Apple both have call screening products. Truecaller, already a household name in India, has been building out its own AI assistant features. In the U.S., a16z-backed privacy startup Cloaked also launched call screening last year. Thiago Viana, global co-head at Prosus Ventures, said that Equal’s understanding of local context gives it an edge.

“Equal AI promises to screen calls for you and provide context on why someone is calling. We think that if an app does well in a few use cases, it can quickly become popular in its niche and create user stickiness to expand in different areas later on,” he told TechCrunch by phone.

Prosus has been investing in AI assistant startups that focus on local markets. Its portfolio includes Spain-based Luzia and Latin America-based Zapia. Both were caught up in Meta’s ban on third-party AI bots on WhatsApp, which serves as a cautionary tale for platform dependency. Equal AI said that it didn’t want to create that kind of dependency — which is why it built around calls and its own app rather than piggybacking on a messaging platform.

After you’ve worked on rockets that find their way to outer space, it can be hard to come up with a second act. For SpaceX alumni Andrew Redd, it meant looking deep in the ocean.

Redd, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a region affected by uncharacteristic heat waves and catastrophic fires in recent years, knew he wanted to tackle something in renewable energy.

“But the experience at a very hardcore company like SpaceX made me realize that I can’t just come up with an incremental solution. It actually has to be brand new and it has to be approached from first principles,” according to Redd, who was an engineer on Dragon and Starship at SpaceX.

Redd left SpaceX and founded Endurance Energy, a startup that has raised a $54 million Series A to eventually harness terawatts of geothermal energy deep in the ocean, TechCrunch has learned. Founders Fund led the round, with participation from Ascend, Construct Capital, Felicis Ventures, First Round Capital, Point72 Ventures, Riot Ventures, and Voyager Ventures. The new funding will allow the company to develop its plans for power plants at a time of surging energy demand from AI data centers, electric vehicles, and heavy industry.

Since founding the company last year, Redd has grown the team to 25 employees, 12 of whom used to work at SpaceX. The company’s vice president of engineering previously worked at Helion Energy, the fusion startup.

Geothermal energy isn’t a new idea — humans have been using the Earth’s heat for millennia, whether it be from spa-like hot springs or geothermal power plants. But Redd, drawing on his experience at SpaceX, figured there was another opportunity people were overlooking. 

Here’s how he distilled the problem: Any future energy source should be renewable, or at least non-polluting, in his opinion. “That’s my non-negotiable,” said Redd, who is CEO of Endurance. It should also be available 24/7 — or baseload power, as the industry calls it — and it should be quickly deployable and able to generate tens or hundreds of gigawatts of electricity, according to Redd. 

He quickly ruled out nuclear power because regulatory and construction timelines can stretch on for years. Solar and wind aren’t available 24/7 without batteries, and hydropower is limited in where it can be built (plus all the good spots have been taken). That left geothermal.

“Geothermal is the only real deployable, baseload renewable,” he said. “But why is it only 0.4% of U.S. energy?”

There are other startups pursuing geothermal, including Fervo and Zanskar. But those companies need to drill thousands of feet into the Earth’s crust to access temperatures hot enough to drive a power plant. So far, the best opportunities for many geothermal startups has been in the Western U.S., far from large population centers.

The best places to drill, where the crust is thin and magma flows close to the surface, like in Iceland or California, have long been claimed. More recently, startups like Fervo Energy, XGS Energy, and Sage Geosystems have found other sites, but to find rocks that are hot enough to drive a power plant, they need to drill thousands of feed deeper. Those locations have so far been away from large population centers.

But no one has tapped the oceans. 

At several points around the globe, the Earth’s tectonic plates are spreading apart, allowing hot magma to flow to the surface. The U.S. West Coast, Japan, and a good chunk of Southeast Asia are near the so-called Ring of Fire, the geologically active zone that encircles the Pacific Ocean.

Heading out to sea poses several challenges. Operating underwater, at the depths Endurance is proposing, isn’t easy. Robots will need to do much of the work. Saltwater is famously corrosive, so anything placed down there will have to be hardened against both water pressure and corrosion. 

But Redd said those are surmountable hurdles, pointing to the oil and gas industry’s decades of experience drilling in the ocean. Endurance’s work should pose less risk to the surrounding ocean, he points out. “If we have a blowout — quote unquote — you’re leaking hot water into the ocean, which is already leaking out in terawatts all over the Earth,” Redd said.

Some of the geothermal resources Endurance is eyeing are a few dozen miles from shore, while others are a few hundred. Which get developed will be the product of an optimization algorithm that balances the cost of the submarine cable with the scale of the resource and the size of the market on shore. (Redd says the company plans to avoid sensitive habitats like those near hydrothermal vents.)

If Endurance taps just a fraction of the geothermal potential out there, it could generate a significant amount of electricity. Redd estimates there’s about 6 terawatts that could be developed in the next five to 10 years around the Ring of Fire. To put that in perspective, the world uses an average of about 20 terawatts across all energy sources at any given moment. 

“The idea is that you could support any major coastal city on the Ring of Fire,” Redd said.

Prometheus, the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Verily, Google’s life sciences unit, announced it raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation.

The new funds came from Bezos himself, as well as from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others.

This is the second fundraise round for Prometheus, which launched late last year with an initial raise of $6.2 billion, according to CNBC.

Prometheus is building what it calls an “artificial general engineer” — software capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems, from jet engines to drug compounds.

The ambition is sweeping: replace large swaths of engineering work with AI. Although the startup will automate many aspects of an engineer’s job, Bezos told CNBC that the productivity gains AI delivers will lead to what he calls “labor scarcity” — his term for a world where demand for human workers outpaces supply.

That puts him at odds with a number of prominent voices in tech. While some AI leaders predict widespread job losses, Bezos sees it differently.

“Significant productivity in the economy is going to raise the standard of living,” he said. “People who today have two-earner households, they’ll become one-earner households. Maybe some people who are working overtime will stop working overtime.”

The company, which currently has 150 employees across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich, is keeping the specifics of what it has already built under wraps.

Bezos indicated that a large portion of the capital will go toward the company’s large compute needs.

Bezos knows something about labor at scale. Amazon — where he serves as executive chairman and is the largest individual shareholder — employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide and over the past year, under CEO Andy Jassy, has laid off tens of thousands of people as the company has accelerated its own automation push.

At $41 billion, Prometheus is one of the most richly valued AI startups ever funded, and one of the largest single bets on the physical AI sector. But it isn’t the only company attracting massive investor interest. In recent months, venture capitalists have increasingly poured capital into physical AI, a booming sector that investors and founders argue is inherently more defensible than pure software — because the physical world creates moats that code alone cannot.

THEKER, the Barcelona-based AI robotics company, has raised €73 million ($85 million) in a Series A to scale its generalist factory robots across industrial production environments. The round was led by CRV, with participation from Samsung, LVMH, Cathay Innovation, 20VC, Henkel Ventures, Korelya, and Bright Pixel Capital. It marks Samsung’s first-ever investment in a Spanish company, LVMH’s first bet on the Spanish startup ecosystem, and CRV’s first investment in Spain.

The round comes less than a year after THEKER closed Spain’s largest-ever seed round at €18 million. The speed from seed to Series A reflects what the company calls real commercial deployment momentum, not just lab demos.

“We didn’t build THEKER to run pilots,” said co-founder Carla Gómez Cano. “We built it to ship robots that work the day they arrive and continue improving every day after.”

THEKER’s pitch is a new category of industrial robot: AI-native, generalist machines that adapt in real time to changing environments, mixed SKUs, irregular shapes, and operational variability without manual reprogramming. Unlike traditional industrial robots that are rigid and costly to reconfigure, THEKER says its systems deploy in days and continuously learn in production.

The robots are already operating inside live production environments across Europe, targeting manufacturing, logistics, and retail. The company says they help operators increase throughput, reduce downtime, and address persistent labour shortages.

Founded by Gómez Cano and Jiaqiang Ye Zhu, THEKER integrates advanced vision, control systems, and large language models into robots that operate without pre-programmed instructions. The funding will go toward deepening its proprietary AI and robotics stack and expanding the team across software, electronics, mechanical engineering, and deployments.

“What Carla, Jiaqiang and the team have built is exceptionally rare, a deeply technical platform paired with real commercial deployment momentum,” said Reid Christian, general partner at CRV. “We believe THEKER has the potential to become one of the defining robotics companies of this generation.”

The raise sits alongside a wave of European robotics funding in 2026. Germany’s RobCo closed €100 million for modular AI-driven manufacturing systems. Stuttgart-based Sereact raised €93 million to scale its physical AI platform into the US. NEURA Robotics raised up to $1.4 billion in the largest full-stack robotics round ever. THEKER’s round is smaller but carries a distinct signal: Samsung and LVMH, two of the world’s largest industrial and luxury conglomerates, are making their first Spanish startup bets on a robotics company, not a software one.

The gap between research demonstrations and robots that work reliably in real factories is where most robotics companies stall. THEKER claims to have crossed it. Whether the robots perform as advertised at scale, across industries and geographies, is the question the €73 million is designed to answer. Factory trials in Germany by Siemens and Nvidia have shown that industrial deployment is possible. THEKER is betting Barcelona can lead it.

Swiss cleantech startup GR3N has raised €15.5 million in a Series B round to build the world’s first commercial-scale microwave-assisted PET recycling plant. The round was led by 360 Capital, with new investor VP Textile also participating. The proceeds will fund MODUS, a 40,000-ton-per-year facility in Spain.

PET is one of the most widely used plastics on the planet. But 98% of recycling relies on mechanical technologies that can only process transparent and light-blue bottles, roughly 15% of total PET waste. The remaining 85%, including textile fibres, films, and coloured resins, ends up in landfill or gets incinerated. It is one of the biggest gaps in the EU’s push to hit its emissions targets.

GR3N’s technology, called MADE (Microwave Assisted DEpolymerisation), can process all of it. Unlike mechanical recycling or alternatives like glycolysis and methanolysis, MADE has no feedstock limitations. It produces food-grade monomers that can be recycled repeatedly without losing performance, while cutting CO2 emissions by up to 80% compared to virgin PET production.

The MODUS plant has secured a €35 million grant agreement under the EU Innovation Fund’s large-scale industrial projects category. Intecsa Industrial, part of the Cobra IS group, is leading the engineering and construction. Financial closure is expected in Q4 2027, with commercial operations planned for Q2 2030.

GR3N was founded in 2013 by Italian inventor Maurizio Crippa, who recently handed the CEO role to Martin Stephan. Stephan brings two decades of experience in technology-driven businesses. Industrial shareholders now include Intecsa Industrial, Standex International, and Chevron.

The round is modest by venture standards, but the EU grant and industrial backing signal that the technology is past the lab stage. If MODUS delivers on its 40,000-ton annual capacity, it would demonstrate that chemical recycling can work at scale for the types of PET waste the industry has struggled to handle. Europe has twice as many climate tech startups as the US, but scaling deep tech from lab to factory remains the hard part.

Megaport spent a decade as a company you used to connect to other people’s clouds. On Wednesday it announced a plan to become one. The Australian networking firm secured four new AI infrastructure contracts worth a combined A$458.9M (about $329M) and launched a fully underwritten entitlement offer to raise A$827.3M (about $594M), according to its filing. The money funds a pivot from plumbing to compute.

The contracts come first. All four are with US-based technology providers running AI applications, are expected to start in the first half of 2027, and require nearly A$369.5M in capital expenditure, mostly for high-performance Nvidia GPUs alongside network and storage. That is a meaningful commitment for a company of Megaport’s size, and it explains why the raise is so large relative to the business.

What the capital is really buying is the strategy behind the contracts. Megaport says it will build a globally distributed AI inference cloud, anchored by an on-demand GPU pool backed by about A$350M in investment and offered to enterprise customers on both contracted and consumption-based pricing.

The pool is to be deployed across the company’s existing footprint of more than 1,100 connected data centres in 31 countries, with rollout over the next six to nine months.

The bet is geographic. Most GPU capacity today sits in a handful of enormous data centres optimised for training the largest models. Megaport is targeting the other half of the AI workload: inference, the act of running a trained model to answer a query, which benefits from being close to the user.

Its pitch is that a distributed network of smaller GPU pools, spread across the data centres it already connects, fits inference better than centralised mega-campuses, and slots into the gap between hyperscaler clouds and single-location GPU specialists.

It is a credible reading of where AI infrastructure is heading. As models move from research demos into products embedded in real applications, the economics shift from training to serving, and serving rewards proximity and distribution.

Megaport already owns the network that links the locations where that compute would live, which is a genuine structural advantage if the thesis holds.

The numbers around the raise were briefly muddled across early coverage, which is worth untangling. The four contracts are worth A$458.9M in total contract value; the capital raise is A$827.3M; the GPU pool commitment is about A$350M.

Several headlines collapsed these into a single figure. They are distinct: contract wins, the money to fund them, and the specific compute investment inside that money.

Megaport also tightened its 2026 revenue guidance to A$307M–A$315M and projected combined group pro forma annual recurring revenue of A$662.9M once the compute division is folded in. The shares were halted while the raise was arranged, a standard mechanism for a deal of this scale on the ASX.

The risk is the obvious one for any company spending heavily on Nvidia GPUs on the strength of contracts that begin in 2027: that AI infrastructure demand, and pricing, may look different by the time the hardware is installed and earning.

Megaport is committing capital now against revenue that lands later, in a market moving fast enough that 18 months is a long time. The contracts give it a floor. The inference-cloud ambition is the part that has to compound, and that is the part the A$827M is really betting on.

TL;DR

Germany-based Focused Energy raised an oversubscribed $240M Series A led by utility RWE to commercialise laser-powered inertial confinement fusion based on the NIF’s historic net energy gain experiment. The company plans a demonstration reactor at a decommissioned German fission plant.

Focused Energy, a Germany-based fusion startup, has raised an oversubscribed $240 million Series A round to develop a commercial reactor based on the same approach that produced the world’s first controlled fusion reaction with net energy gain. The round, led by German utility RWE, brings the company’s total private capital to $300 million. Focused Energy has also received $200 million in grants, making it one of the most heavily funded fusion startups in the world at approximately $500 million in total funding.

The round also included participation from SPRIND, the German Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, Prime Movers Lab, and the European Innovation Council Fund. Focused Energy plans to build its first demonstration system, called Lighthouse, at the site of a decommissioned nuclear fission power plant in Germany operated by RWE, a practical decision that leverages existing grid connections, cooling infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks designed for nuclear facilities.

From NIF experiment to commercial reactor

Focused Energy’s approach is inertial confinement fusion, in which lasers compress a fuel target to create conditions extreme enough for atoms to fuse and release energy. The technique was validated in December 2022 at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a breakthrough that arrived as global energy demand from AI data centres was beginning to surge. That experiment remains the first and only controlled fusion reaction to release more energy than was required to ignite it.

The NIF connection is not just conceptual. Debbie Callahan, who helped design the fuel target used in the historic NIF experiment, joined Focused Energy in December as chief strategy officer. Her task is to simplify the target for commercial production. The NIF’s fuel target is complex and difficult to manufacture, and the facility fires approximately 400 shots per year. A commercial reactor will need to fire 10 shots per second, or roughly 864,000 per day.

One critical simplification is eliminating the hohlraum, a precision-manufactured gold cylinder that the NIF uses to convert laser energy into X-rays, which then compress the fuel pellet. Focused Energy’s “direct drive” system skips this intermediate step, with lasers compressing the fuel pellet directly. This should improve the reactor’s energy efficiency and simplify the fuel target manufacturing process, both of which are essential for a system that needs to operate continuously at industrial scale.

A crowded field with real money

Focused Energy is entering an increasingly competitive fusion landscape. European deep tech startups are attracting significant government and private investment, and fusion is among the most capital-intensive categories. Inertia Enterprises raised a $450 million Series A in February for its own inertial confinement reactor, making it a direct competitor. Thea Energy raised $100 million last week for a pixel-inspired fusion approach. Type One Energy, backed by Bill Gates, raised nearly $90 million toward a $250 million Series B in January. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is in Gigascale Capital’s portfolio, raised $863 million for its magnetic confinement approach.

The investment wave reflects a convergence of factors: the NIF’s proof that net energy gain is physically possible, AI-driven electricity demand that is straining existing grids, and government programmes in the US, EU, and UK that are providing grants and regulatory frameworks for fusion development. Energy storage and generation technologies that can provide baseload power without carbon emissions are attracting capital that would have been unimaginable five years ago.

The engineering gap

The distance between the NIF experiment and a commercial power plant is enormous. The NIF achieved net energy gain measured against the energy delivered to the fuel, not against the total energy consumed by the laser system, which is orders of magnitude larger. A commercial reactor must achieve gain measured against total system input, which requires both more efficient lasers and higher-yield fuel targets.

Focused Energy’s direct-drive approach addresses part of this gap by removing the hohlraum’s energy losses, but the company still needs to demonstrate that its laser system can achieve the precision, repetition rate, and efficiency required for continuous operation. The urgency of the energy problem is real, with AI infrastructure alone expected to consume 9% of US electricity by 2030, but urgency does not change the physics.

RWE’s involvement as lead investor is the most commercially meaningful signal in the round. A major European utility putting capital into a fusion startup and offering a decommissioned plant site for the demonstration system suggests that at least one entity with deep experience operating power plants believes Focused Energy’s approach has a credible path to grid-connected electricity. Whether Lighthouse can bridge the gap between laboratory physics and commercial power generation is the $500 million question.

Before Zack Eakin sold investors on his new startup, he practiced on Palmer Luckey.

When Eakin left Luckey’s defense startup, Anduril, in 2024 to start a new composites company called Layup Parts, Luckey — along with Anduril co-founders Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm — let him workshop the pitch.

He got different feedback from each, Eakin told TechCrunch. Grimm helped him think about how to pitch VCs, Schimpf (Anduril’s CEO) pushed him on strategy, while Luckey — ever the fundraiser — guided him on the storytelling.

This miniature boot camp appears to have worked. Two years ago, Eakin raised a $9 million seed round. The startup announced Tuesday it has raised another $42 million in a Series A funding round led by dual-use venture fund Marlinspike, with participation from new investors Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners, and existing backers Founders Fund and Lux Capital.

It’s a tidy sum for the Huntington Beach, California, startup, which employs just 60 people or so. And much of it will go toward people. Layup Parts used most of its seed money on capital expenditures. Eakin wants to use the new funding to grow the startup’s ranks and move into a bigger facility this year. The goal is to make ordering custom parts made of carbon fiber or fiberglass as easy as if they were sold on Amazon.

Eakin has been working with composite materials for around two decades, dating back to his time in motorsports, he told TechCrunch. The engineer started his professional career at Chip Ganassi Racing, where he worked with carbon-fiber structures and bodywork, especially for the company’s IndyCar entries and the radical (and radically controversial) DeltaWing prototype.

Eakin took a bit of a detour to become the first engineer at Elon Musk’s Boring Company in 2017. But by 2021, he was once again elbow-deep in composites when he took the role at Anduril.

It was at that point Eakin realized how, during his time digging tunnels, something of a revolution had started in the worlds of industrial fabrication and manufacturing. Startups like SendCutSend and Protolabs had dramatically reduced the time and cost required to prototype and ship parts to customers. But no one was doing this for composites, he said.

“It just kind of dawned on me that, like, all these other manufacturing verticals are getting better, [and] we are struggling to find people to make our composite parts for us,” Eakin said. “Why is there nobody trying to make this better?”

It’s not that Eakin didn’t know the answer. Composites tend to be harder to deal with in general — or, as he put it, there are “a lot more fingers and eyeballs involved.” Plus, there had been a lot of consolidation among composite companies, according to Eakin.

This meant bigger firms were less likely to try to innovate and risk their dependable revenue streams. And even if they wanted to, he said, these companies don’t have the software talent to build the tools required to reach that goal of getting to a one- or even zero-click solution.

“If we have stock materials, and you have a good understanding of those materials, we can build software that has an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of clicking it takes for an engineer to produce those — and ultimately gets to zero clicks, where it just takes customer data and poops out shapes,” he said with a smile.

Eakin said it became obvious that the best way to do this was to start a whole new composites company and that these challenges made the idea all the more valuable.

“I just decided this might be the best thing I can do for Anduril, is to go fix this part of the supply chain, because I don’t think it’s just an Anduril problem,” he said.

So far, he’s been right. In the two years since Eakin founded Layup Parts, his team has been rapidly prototyping and producing parts for a variety of customers, including motorsports, design studios making show cars, and even pickleball paddle companies. The company has already cut the time between receiving customer data and manufacturing a part down from weeks to hours in some cases.

The biggest business lines, unsurprisingly, are aerospace and defense. That includes both startups and the more traditional defense primes, according to Eakin.

The opportunity is evident in the cap table. There’s the lead backer Marlinspike, which is already invested in Anduril and a number of other defense-focused manufacturing companies. Cerberus Ventures was started in 2023 by Chris Darby, who spent nearly 20 years running the CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel.

While Eakin looks back fondly on what he learned from Anduril and its leaders, he’s also carrying over skills he learned at The Boring Company. Despite not working with composites there, he said a lot still applies to a startup. Working at The Boring Company involved a lot of “first-principles engineering stuff, very similar to what we would do in racing,” he said.

“Elon has a very high sense of urgency, so as much as it was a new type of thing to make, it felt familiar with the crazy deadlines and just developing stuff as fast as you can,” he said.

Focused Energy recently raised an oversubscribed $240 million Series A round, one of the largest early-stage rounds for a fusion power startup. 

The new round, announced last week, brings the company’s total private capital raised to $300 million, the company told TechCrunch. The startup has also received $200 million in grants, collectively making it one of the most heavily funded fusion startups.

Germany-based Focused Energy is developing a reactor that will use lasers to compress fusion fuel, an approach known as inertial confinement. The lasers fire on a fuel target, which compresses under the onslaught to create conditions ripe for fusion. When atoms inside the fuel finally fuse, they release significant amounts of energy.

The company is basing its design on the experiment at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. That experiment is so far the first and only one to create a controlled nuclear fusion reaction that released more energy than it took to ignite it. The NIF connection is more than conceptual — Debbie Callahan, who helped design the fuel target at the NIF, joined Focused Energy in December as its chief strategy officer. 

At Focused Energy, Callahan is working to simplify the fuel target. The NIF’s target is complex and hard to manufacture, and the facility only fires about 400 shots per year. Focused Energy, on the other hand, will need to do 10 shots per second, or about 864,000 shots per day. 

One simplification involves doing away with the hohlraum, a precision-manufactured gold cylinder that converts laser energy into X-rays. The X-rays do the work of compressing the fuel pellet at the NIF. Focused Energy’s laser system is what industry insiders call “direct drive” — that is, the lasers directly compress the fuel pellet. That should help boost the reactor’s efficiency, making it easier to produce power. 

Focused Energy is hoping to build its first demonstration system, Lighthouse, at the site of a decommissioned nuclear fission power plant in Germany that was operated by the utility RWE. 

RWE was the main investor in the Series A, Focused Energy told TechCrunch. The round also included participation from the German Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND), Prime Movers Lab, and the European Innovation Council Fund.

As large as this Series A is, the fusion industry has been an investor favorite this year. Last week, Thea Energy raised $100 million to develop its pixel-inspired fusion reactor. In February, Inertia Enterprises raised a $450 million Series A to develop its own reactor, which could be a close competitor to Focused Energy’s. And in January, Type One Energy told TechCrunch that it had raised almost $90 million toward a $250 million Series B.