Launch HN: Maritime Fusion (YC W25) – Fusion Reactors for Ships
Hey HN, we’re Justin and Jason, co-founders of Maritime Fusion (https://maritimefusion.com/). We’re working on putting fusion reactors on ships—specifically, large container ships and defence applications. Should be easy!
Yes, we know: fusion has been the energy source of the future…and it always will be. But high-temperature superconductors (HTS) have changed the game for magnetic confinement, and we believe we’ll witness Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years. That’s huge.
(Side note: Q is the ratio of input power divided by output power. Q> 1 means the reactor is producing more power than it consumes, achieving ‘breakeven.’)
However, getting to breakeven is just the first daunting challenge. Making the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) reactors cost-competitive on the grid? That might be even harder than achieving breakeven.
That’s why we’re taking this soon-to-be breakthrough in fusion and applying it to the first market we believe makes sense: ships.
Instead of targeting 24/7 baseload grid electricity—where fusion has to compete with solar, wind, batteries, and natural gas—we’re focusing on large commercial shipping (>10,000 TEU) and mobile military vessels to provide ship-to-shore power capability.
Why ships? They don’t have great alternatives—the shipping industry is desperate to decarbonize. Hydrogen and ammonia are being explored, but come with serious downsides: low energy density, flammability, leaks, and massive infrastructure challenges. Fusion will provide a high-energy-density, long-range solution without the same infrastructure challenges—once it works, of course!
One common question is, why not fission? Fission works technically, but not practically. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could power ships, but licensing fission reactors on land is already brutally hard and expensive—doing it for vessels moving between international ports with enriched uranium is nearly impossible. Public perception is another major barrier: if we’re deploying thousands of nuclear reactors globally, they need to be meltdown-proof. Fusion is the only way to guarantee that. Regulation also isn’t as bad. While fusion won’t be a walk in the park to license, the NRC has declared a distinct framework for it—more like particle accelerators and hospitals than nuclear power plants. That’s a game-changer.
Instead of a 500+ MW grid-scale reactor, our system is 25 MWe, designed for ship propulsion. Our tokamak is roughly JET-sized, but with HTS magnets (8-9T) and higher plasma current (~10MA). The first-wall power flux is down from multi-MW/m² to nearly 500 kW/m²—still tough, but not nightmare mode. The materials challenges associated with the first wall and nuclear activation of the structures is greatly reduced. Also, ships don’t require 90% uptime like grid power plants. Downtime for maintenance is part of normal operations, making this a far more forgiving early application of fusion, unlike the grid where every down hour is lost revenue.
Jason and I come from SpaceX and Tesla, where we solved hard engineering problems at scale. My background is nuclear engineering (NC State, BS) and plasma physics (Columbia University, MS). We’ve been busy during our time in YC making technical progress on our reactor design, and are in the process of assembling a team of engineers who can pull this off.
This is a ridiculously hard problem, of course. But we think it’s the right hard problem—one that’s actually solvable (and worth solving!) with today’s tech if applied correctly. Eventually the cheaper and more robust SOAK and NOAK (second-of-a-kind and nth-of-a-kind) reactors will arrive in the coming decades (2050-2060) and then we'll pivot to decarbonising the grid and saving the world (we'll need to change our name), but until then we'll be out in the ocean!
Would love to hear your thoughts—whether you’re deep into plasma physics and engineering, skeptical-but–curious, or convinced it will never work . Ask us anything!
"Downtime for maintenance is part of normal operations, making this a far more forgiving early application of fusion, unlike the grid where every down hour is lost revenue."
Planned maintenance, sure, but unplanned maintenance means the same lost revenue, plus you're stuck floating in the middle of the pacific ocean, possibly in need of parts or debugging expertise that only exists half a planet away or, for that matter, food. It's certainly a good idea to find a niche to make market entry easier, but I would guess that reliability requirements are actually higher for ships than for microgrids. Find some isolated town or island running off flaky diesel generators on shipped-in fuel and negotiate a reasonable SLA.
This ignores, of course, the bigger problem: making fusion work at all at Q > 1. If it were me, I'd work on solving that before worrying too much about optimizing market entry. So far every single fusion effort has failed to clear that hurdle, and any effort on the other parts is wasted if you can't actually make power.
The first ocean-going steamships still had sails - it took many years for steam power to fully displace sail. Presumably a new maritime power system, like fusion, would follow a similar pattern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat#Sea-_and_Ocean-going
There is something very compelling about a fusion-powered ship also having sails.
> and we believe we’ll witness Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years. That’s huge.
I think it fits squarely in the "requires extraordinary evidence" bucket - what makes you so bold ?
Also, what's you intermediate plans between :
2025 -> Post on HN
2028 -> Q>1 achieved (by you ? by someone else ?)
???? -> ????
20xx -> a ship goes to sea powered by a fusion reactor
???? -> ????
2060 -> fusion is so easy, let's use it for baseload
Sorry if I sound stark, but I'm already burnt out and fed up with the "breakthroughs" on batteries that never materialize - I have a very low tolerance threshold for startups promising fusion for next week ;)
If you're on to something, more power to you - we need that yesterday.
Also, what's you intermediate plans between :
2025 -> Post on HN
2028 -> Q>1 achieved (by you ? by someone else ?)
CFS plans Q>1 for 2027 with a tokamak design. If they succeed then there will be plenty of VC for similar designs. I'd place my bets that CFS succeeds with Q>1. And I think the real problem will be the energy flux and neutron handling and thus much more a material sciences problem than a plasma physics problem. Thus the idea to look for a niche that has lower power needs is a very clever one. My bet would be rather on Maritime Fusion than Helion. But nevertheless, CFS will be likely first at Q>1 however there is always space for another competitor.
Let's also be really explicit... CFS is targeting Q>1 by 2027 for nuclear fusion via the SPARC reactor, but not Q>1 for electrical generation. The latter is slated for sometime in the early 2030s via the subsequent ARC reactor.
All of this is driven by HTS. Fusion reactors (generically) scale to the inverse^4 of magnetic field strength. HTS doubled the achievable magnetic field strength of electromagnets, which means that ITER-like performance can be achieved in university-scale reactors at comercially-viable, lower costs.
Dr. Dennis Whyte (MIT Nuclear Eng Prof) gave a great seminar at Berkeley that covered some technical nuances. It's mandatory watching if you want to geek out and understand the fusion hype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM
> that ITER-like performance can be achieved in university-scale reactors at comercially-viable, lower costs
Are they going to upgrade it or it’s already obsolete before it was even finished?
Exactly this !!
The HN battery checklist needs to be reworked for fusion power. Arguably, even though people think it’s trolling to use the checklist, I’ve found it surprisingly educational each time.
Sounds interesting, could you post that checklist?
This one I presume:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Dear battery technology claimant,
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
[ ] your claims are lies
flashbacks to slashdot
> Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world.
As a corroboration, current hotness in cell phones is existing lithium ion tech with new silicon-carbon anodes.
And one for fusion
----------------------------------
Dear Nuclear Fusion Power Claimant
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary nuclear fusion power technology. Your new technology claims to solve humanity's energy problems, produce unlimited clean energy, and is just months away from commercialization. Unfortunately, your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it requires materials that cannot be produced at any scale.
[ ] its energy gain (Q factor) is still substantially less than 1.
[ ] its plasma instabilities modes are completely unknown.
[ ] its plasma modeling behavior relies exclusively on numerical simulations.
[ ] it cannot sustain required plasma confinement criteria
[ ] it cannot handle the neutron flux without rapid degradation of components.
[ ] it requires magnetic fields stronger than currently achievable
[ ] it consumes more energy in cooling systems than it produces.
[ ] your claimed breakthrough violates fundamental physics.
[ ] the same approach was tried in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and abandoned each time for good reason
[ ] by the time it ships, renewable energy plus storage will be far cheaper.
[ ] your timeline has been "5 years away" for the past 50 years.
[ ] your claims are lies.
Sincerely, The Energy Research Community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025969
Re Q>1, isn't that just the reaction making more power as heat than you put in and you need something like Q>5 to use the heat to make steam to make electricity to run the thing? (as in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor)
How about first getting fusion to work for reality before getting it working for maritime.
How much design on an actual reactor can you do already if the whole technology isn't even demonstrated yet? How many changes are you prepared to do based on the results of the current scientific reactors?
We can get pretty far along! From magnetic system design, vacuum vessel, RF heating system, cryogenic system, tritium fueling, etc we can start making a ton of progress today. The main things we still need to learn that can influence the design is advanced divertor scenarios and what are best material choices for plasma facing components (PFC's).
How certain is it that a tokamak is even able to be run in a stable manner? What if it turns out that a stellarator would be better? Or is that already validated by now?
The stellarator design makes more sense to me as well and speaking of it, those guys will build a stellarator on land:
https://www.proximafusion.com/press-news/proxima-fusion-and-...
Problems are still many, though (Paper:)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092037962...
Saw that this morning as well, it's awesome. I do think long term especially for grid applications stellarators could be great... note that their design is ~2.7GW I believe. We're talking gigantic traditional power plant size, which the world needs, but the first generation of these facilities will cost multi billions of dollars. Also with the stellarator, doing non planar HTS coils and the associated manufacturing challenge is a very very hard problem.
Well, definitely good luck with your approach as well!
I guess the biggest hurdle will be stable operation, without having to replace too many broken parts too often?
Tokamak requires regular shutdown as far as I understood and that is quite a lot of heat stress for all the parts I believe, along with the radiation etc.
(But I lack the background to really debate on the pro vs cons of tokamak vs stellarator, I just have opinions here)
How do you intend to address the crew training issue? Merchant vessel operators tend to hire low wage seamen with limited technical training, plus a few qualified engineering officers. Marine diesel engines are pretty simple and robust but I would imagine that operating a fusion plant might require more technical training.
So your approach to fusion is "the same CFS but stay at roughly the size of the SPARC prototype instead of scaling up"?
When you say "Q > 1 within a few (say 3) years" are you talking about your own reactors, or others? For that matter, are you trying to partner with CFS and license their technology or are you intending on starting "from scratch" (from whatever is publicly available)?
If that timeline is for fusion in general, what do you think your timeline looks like? Assuming adequate access to funding how soon can you build a Q>1 reactor? How soon after that can you actually go to market and sell a reactor?
---
On an unrelated note, I'm curious what you think of the current approaches to commercial fusion being attempted. Are Tokamaks the only game in town in your mind? Or do the various other approaches also being tried out right now have a good shot (MIF/Zpinches/etc)? Any particular approaches you think are particularly likely to succeed.
This being ycombinator and a startup I'm obligated to say that I don't ask this question because I think it impacts your commercial viability much, the greatest risks in fusion definitely aren't the competitors. I ask it just because I'm curious what people willing to start a fusion company think of the competitors.
---
Ships make a ton of sense to me as an early market. An 11 figure market (according to my own napkin calculations awhile back) where power is much more expensive than on land. At the same time it's never struck me that the hardest part of building a fusion company is finding a market.
Our device is larger than SPARC (~3m major radius) and less power (100MW fusion), hence the confidence in being able to solve the steady-state (repeated inductive pulses) engineering challenges.
We won’t be the first to Q>1, I’m super excited for SPARC to achieve that and will be prepared with champagne.
We’re targeting early 2030’s for our reactor, we’re going straight for the full thing no sub scale reactor in between (we do have a plan for milestone-ing it out in a meaningful way)
I’ve worked on a few alternative approaches earlier in my career (FRC at Princeton, dense plasma focus at LPP Fusion) … I think all fusion approaches are worth looking at, but I’m placing my chips on the tokamak. If I were to pick a runner up, the stellerator.
I think your timeline is at best optimistic. I would personally like to see fixed land based fusion power work before we start trying to build them into moving vessels.
Your claim that the shipping industry is "desperate to decarbonize" also needs a citation. From what I've seen shippers top three concerns are "how to minimize costs", "how to reduce costs", and "how to save money". Can you make this system cheaper to operate than heavy fuel oil? If not it is unlikely to gain traction.
I'm just going to put this here. Someone please make this a reality.
### *"Tokamak Sailor"* (To the tune of "Drunken Sailor")
*(Verse 1)* What shall we do with a tokamak sailor? What shall we do with a tokamak sailor? What shall we do with a tokamak sailor? Early in the mornin'!
*(Chorus)* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Fusion in the mornin'!*
*(Verse 2)* Raise the coils and heat up the torus! Raise the coils and heat up the torus! Raise the coils and heat up the torus! Early in the mornin'!
(Chorus repeats)
*(Verse 3)* Confine the plasma, don't let it scatter! Confine the plasma, don't let it scatter! Confine the plasma, don’t let it scatter! Early in the mornin'!
(Chorus repeats)
*(Verse 4)* Sail with the power of fusion glory! Sail with the power of fusion glory! Sail with the power of fusion glory! Early in the mornin'!
(Final Chorus, extra loud!) *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Ho, ho! Fire up the plasma!* *Fusion in the mornin'!*
Now all aboard the reactor ship, lads! Keep that plasma hot, and may the tides be ever in our favor!
Lol - on it
Dumb layperson question: my understanding of confined plasma fusion from a while ago was that the energy flux across the enclosing boundary can not be handled by known materials without melting down. Is this still true? Not sure if you can share but would be curious to know what the "bottleneck" material is in your design as far as withstanding high temperatures/other extreme conditions goes.
Cool!
Ships were the first application that came to my mind when I read about the roughly container-sized reactor by Lockheed Skunk Worls...that didn't happen.
Are you guys working together the Commonwealth Fusion Systems? JET-Size and HTS magnets sounds a lot like SPAR/ARC.
Hot stuff. Both literally and figuratively. An energy breakthrough is really required to get the world back on track. My thesis is that the longer it takes for us to get on the fusion train the more craziness we will see in the world. Wish you all the best and will follow your journey.
> An energy breakthrough is really required to get the world back on track
Not really, the energy technologies we've needed have been around for about half a century, with quite reasonable economics (albeit less and less so, as the time pressure increases), especially compared to the alternative. The problems that need to be solved are political and economic, not technical.
> The problems that need to be solved are political and economic, not technical.
You're saying the technical problems involved in fusion power have already been solved. They haven't.
Why specifically target maritime? Getting a stationary reactor to 25MWe at all would be an incredible feat in itself.
True there would be other land based uses for a 25MWe fusion reactor, the thing is it will be quite expensive and hard to compete on $/kWh against other energy sources... it's easier to compete in maritime / there aren't as good alternatives.
It seems like if you can get the reactor working then you're floating right on top of all the fuel you could ever want, provided you're doing hydrogen fusion.
Mounting a fusion reactor (largely automated - these ships have a skeleton crew) on every big ship seems ambitious enough, why would you...sure, why not, package an automated deuterium fuel refinement facility in a box on the ship too. In another ten years you'll be getting them in Christmas crackers.
where can I read about fully-automated, ship-stable, ~zero maintenance deuterium sea-water extraction systems?
> we’re focusing on large commercial shipping (>10,000 TEU) and mobile military vessels to provide ship-to-shore power capability
I can't tell for sure what this means, if it's propulsion or a temporary ship to shore power plant. I suppose this gives them the latitude to target both. Or perhaps the idea is to get exposure to maritime shipping investors.
A mobile power plant might be useful for deep sea mining, or meeting seasonal energy demands for major cities.
Unlike what the nuclear Navy does today which is directly mechanically link the steam turbine to the propeller... we have the turbine spin a generator that creates a high voltage electric bus, which can than power a motor for propulsion. But you can 'easily' swap out the motor and tap off that HV bus for any other electrical load. Agree with all those other potential applications for mobile power at sea, there's a ton! Even disaster relief after hurricanes sort of thing, if the grid goes down we sail over and support.
YC26 featuring Mokkatok - fusion for third wave coffee shops. You heard it here first
"First-wall power flux" - am I right in thinking that means the heat energy the innermost wall has to contain? Half a megawatt per square meter? Good lord. You're not making it out of 3/4" plywood then.
Maintenance isn't just about downtime though right? This is gonna have to be supported by your crews traveling globally with trade secret, exotic parts. Not even on the top ten hardest things about this of course.
It's an exciting bet for sure, so good luck - if it works, you're taking a big bite out of a really nasty carbon source.
The mere fact that you're proposing doing this on a moving vessel already tells me you're completely incompetent. No one has made fusion net positive, somehow building a net positive fusion reactor on a boat would be fine I guess but to suggest its better than enriched uranium is dishonest. You'll have more luck building a regular fission reactor on a commercial freighter than verify a fusion reactor for any ocean capable ship.
Have you modeled how plasma will behave when your reactor walls move tens of meters in any possible direction while rotating violently in every degree of freedom? Mind you, its not the plasma I'm concerned about. The ideal gas law keeps the atmosphere nice and steady. Its more of a combination of high magnetic field strength with salt water everywhere around the reactor that when destabilised in the slightest will cause a massive implosion.
>Jason and I come from SpaceX and Tesla >in the coming decades (2050-2060) >we'll pivot to decarbonising the grid and saving the world
just make a fission reactor, on land, in a pit, with a massive concrete wall between me and potential neutrons.
You'll have more luck building a regular fission reactor on a commercial freighter than verify a fusion reactor for any ocean capable ship.
That part, I'm not so sure about. Enriched uranium is potentially dangerous stuff, and has to be guarded closely. In a world with literal pirates, getting one on a commercial ship sounds very, very unlikely.
As you say, fusion seems equally unlikely, albeit from a physics standpoint rather than a regulatory standpoint. It's hard to tell whether the immovable object of physics would dominate the unstoppable force of regulation, or vice versa.
Very cool. If you could also make a smaller one with ~3kw output that fits on a locomotive frame you'd literally have the entire freight rail industry the world over as customers.
Would you though? A lot of freight lines in europe are already electric, wouldn't it be much more efficient to have a stationary high-power reactor than carrying around a smaller one on each locomotive?
That might be balanced somewhat by not needing to maintain thousands of miles of caternary wire.
I think maintaining thousands of miles of wire and one large powerplant would be cheaper than maintaining thousands of small mobile reactors, but that's just speculation of course. And most of the wire has to already be there anyways for passenger transport, I think, because many rail lines are used by cargo and people. Unless every train should have a reactor?
Once we have cheap miniaturized fusion reactors, that work stable - we won't need so much electric wiring anymore, true.
Unfortunately, so far exactly 0 working fusion reactors have been build, so currently, I would not demolish electric lines just yet.
The underlying technology does not exist in a production form, to the extent that it's not clear which basic reactor design option is going to be the future. So we can't know what the maintenance burden from a fisson rector is, much less one mounted on a train. Don't plan on tearing down those overhead cables just yet.
3kW output? I think you mean 5MW output... large electric locomotives are in 2.5 to 3.5MW continuos power. Some diesel-electric huge ones are even larger, like 5MW.
Yeah must’ve meant MW.. I’ve got more than one 3KW generator at my house and they can barely run my AC much less a locomotive.
What kind of a blanket are you using and how thick is it? Seems like that would be the determining factor for size and cost.
If you are fantasizing the implementation of an imaginary future technology, why not fusion power for SPACE ships?
What's going on in your business plan that would be different if we replaced "future tokamak" with:
- compact CPP-violating antimatter reactor
- super-efficient MHD turbine
- perpetual motion engine
- magic box which will be invented in 5 years
No, really, I want to know what you would do differently in each of these situations.
What is the feedback from actual prospective clients?
Did YC ask mostly about feasibility, or were they more interested in the customer's opinion?
The customers are interested, there's really no slam dunk other way to decarbonize the industry, it's a super hard (and expensive) problem.
This is awesome— sounds hard but rooting for you guys.
> Our tokamak is
Use of the present tense here is interesting. Do they have a tokamak?
They have 3d renderings of one. So, in VC-speak, yes.
As it applies to shipping, I'm curious to know if you initially considered alternative/hybrid approaches which would augment current/modern approaches to shipping, like using sails. It seems to me like this is an obvious miss in modern (dirty) shipping.
There are other companies doing exactly this (for a random example: https://www.bartechnologies.uk/), but they definitely don't replace the need for engines entirely, just reduce their usage by a bit.
Not sure why you would expect a fusion company to have anything to do with this. The technology is completely different.
(Note: not affiliated with launching company, just a random commenter)
Fusion will never be practical. Why not put it in an application that will ALSO never be practical?
If it's small enough to fit in every ship used in a carrier group, you could revolutionize US naval operations.
The carrier is nuclear powered and can travel at its top speed indefinitely. But it doesn't except briefly in emergencies, because the rest of the group is powered by oil and would quickly run out of fuel.
Twitter thread:
https://x.com/MKVRiscy/status/1893590632901595491
Excellent initiative. From the 1st reading, it does seem "within the realms of current technology". All the best.
I have a small question. Which CAD / 3D / Physics software is used for such design and simulations ?
Thank you! We're probably going to have to eventually use every engineering software in existence haha for CAD, mainly solidworks and CATIA, for EM Physics modeling: COMSOL. But most of the analysis is done with specialized plasma physics and radiation transport codes like MCNP or Open MC.
Really excited about this! Congrats on the launch. Ships make sense as a first target, but I'm curious -- do you see a future in which we have household fission reactors? E.G. power an entire house (city block, etc...) with fission reactors?
Thank you! Household fission reactors: my take is that from a technical perspective we could definitely do it. It's more from a proliferation and nuclear waste perspective, will it be allowed and accepted by the public? Not sure, maybe though.
If that's a concern, how do you solve that for shipping? What if some somali pirate steals your fusion ship? Would they have to have armed protection (on top of the guards they already have, that's probably not enough when nuclear proliferation is the issue)?
With fusion, there is no Uranium or Plutonium or highly radioactive materials. The main concern is Tritium which is a categorically reduced concern from enriched Uranium (but still needs to be secured and accounted for).
Is the tritium a different isotope than the one I can have shipped to my house on the internet?
https://tritiumworkshop.com/products/megaglow-tritium-marker...
Nope, that's it! We do need vastly larger quantities though, on the order of a kilogram.
why do we continue to discount solar and batteries for home use?
The argument that I've heard is that roof installed solar is incredibly expensive compared to all other solar. Add in the other compromises with orientation and obstructed sunlight, and you quickly realize that it is likely better to install solar and batteries at dedicated power facilities that scale better than to distribute the infrastructure in residential neighborhoods.
What would the engine with this look like? Does it cause a lot of noise or any other damage to sea life?
It's a heavy black box which emits neutrons.
The good news is that neutrons are easily absorbed by steel and water.
The bad news is that the resulting irradiated steel isn't anywhere near as strong as it was pre-irradiation.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run...
> Fission works technically, but not practically. Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) could power ships
It's not like they “could”, they do actually power more than a hundred vessels worldwide (mostly submarines, but also aircraft carriers and icebreakers (the russians have 8 of those)) ;).
I really fail to see how the stated credentials here add up to a team that can achieve fusion on ships. I hope you’re able to hoover up enough VC money to find people who have the appropriate backgrounds to do this.
Good luck. I'd wager you'll end up pivoting to SMRs. They exist today. Are cheaper to produce. And their failure mode would be... capsizing the reactor at sea probably and running on stored diesel until you make it to port?
We've been running reactors on ships since the 50s after all.
> I'd wager you'll end up pivoting to SMRs. They exist today.
who is selling ~zero maintenance, mass-produced SMRs today?
I meant in that they could actually be built and working SMRs exist in labs and test facilities in greater numbers than fusion reactors. My local university has been running one for ages.
Sorry for being so naive but I need to ask: What is the difference between a startup dedicated to making "Fusion Reactors for Maritime Ships" and a startup dedicated to making "Anti-Gravity devices for Airplanes"? Since you're talking about applying a non existing technology to a specific market, swing for the fences and go all in.
Or swing for all the fences at once--"we're making fusion powered AGI for the technorapture!" Or similarly, why not faster than light space travel?
so, given no one knows how to use fusion to produce energy, why do you think now is the time to plan how to put this non-existent technology on to boats?
Congrats on launching. This is a hard area. Wish you luck.
Thank you!
> “focusing on military vessels … [we] come from SpaceX and Tesla”
So you guys are basically part of the MAGA military complex? Why do you need YC?
Is funding your moonshot concept a way for YC to signal something politically?
Nothing to do with the hot news of the moment. It's just YC doing what it always does.
I think there is probably some kind of headline bleedover effect where, because of repetition, we start seeing these things everywhere, like the afterimage of a bright light.
I think the point being made is more subtle than you're appreciating: it's not just any defense firm, it's a defense firm founded by engineers who have worked on multiple Elon projects. I understand we try to stay away from politics here, but speaking objectively+non-normatively: Elon has been known to greatly favor working with people that have worked at his companies, and he now has immense influence over the contracting processing of the federal government.
In other words: two Cybertruck engineers starting a defense company in February 2025 is naturally going to raise some eyebrows, especially when they're selling a technology that they're counting on other people to invent soon.
More interestingly/generally, your mention of confirmation bias/Bader-Meinhoff raises a question for me: is Y-Combinator really investing more in government and heavy industry as it appears? And it looks like the answer is yes, though it's still a tiny minority compared to general B2B SaaS companies:
https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-last-decade-of-y-combi...
Government is a bigger slicer than it's been since 2017, and similar for industry. More drastically, the pool of companies has greatly constricted in geographic terms, with almost all of the 2024 batch coming from the US. Most importantly--as many of y'all probably already know, but I didn't--they just backed their first pure-defense startup in August, Ares Cruise Missiles.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries
As far as company mottos go, "Missiles are cool" is a fucking terrifying one... Every day I fear the LessWrong people were less wrong than I thought they were.
You guys are welcome to connect whatever macro dots you like however you like, but the idea that YC funding decisions would change depending on the politics of the CEOs of the companies the founders used to work for strikes me as absurd, and I think I have a basis for saying that.
YC's process basically looks like this: smart founders? check. Technical? check. Big important problem? check. Technically credible on this problem? check. "Did $Thing at $Company" can add to the 2nd and 4th of those points, for obvious reasons, but the idea of some triple-bank-shot collusion/corruption with Big Political Players is, I'm afraid, too much internet.
This is important because I/we would hate it if any (smart, technical, wanting-to-work-on-big-problem) founder were to read such threads and think "I don't have Connections, so I guess YC is not for me." Please don't anyone think that! If that's you, then YC is most certainly for people like you, and you have as good a chance as anyone, precisely because these externalities don't make a difference in this context.
now, this is a thing that I want to see YC invest more into
Agreed!