Fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises has signed three landmark agreements with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, aiming to turn the lab’s National Ignition Facility from a historic science experiment into the basis for commercial power plants.

The deals give Inertia privileged access to the only fusion experiment that has ever produced more energy than it consumed to spark the reaction. NIF’s achievement, known as scientific breakeven, proved that controlled fusion can work in principle. Inertia, backed by a $450 million Series A round, is now betting it can make it work as a business.

Unlike magnetic confinement fusion, which uses powerful magnets to corral superheated plasma, Inertia and LLNL are pursuing inertial confinement fusion. In this approach, a tiny fuel pellet is crushed so violently and so quickly that its atoms fuse before the material can fly apart.

At NIF, 192 giant lasers fire into a cavernous vacuum chamber, converging on a gold cylinder called a hohlraum. Inside sits a BB-sized, diamond-coated pellet filled with deuterium and tritium, heavy forms of hydrogen. When the lasers strike the hohlraum, it vaporizes and emits a burst of X-rays that slam into the pellet. The diamond shell turns into plasma and implodes, compressing the fuel to the extreme temperatures and pressures needed for fusion.

Today, NIF can perform this feat only a few times a week. A commercial plant would need to repeat it several times per second, with far more efficient lasers and mass-produced fuel targets. That is the engineering cliff Inertia now has to climb.

The new agreements include two strategic partnership projects and a cooperative research and development agreement. Together, they focus on designing next-generation lasers, improving target performance, and developing manufacturing methods that could churn out precision fuel pellets at industrial scale. Inertia is also licensing nearly 200 LLNL patents, giving it a deep portfolio of intellectual property rooted in decades of government-funded research.

The collaboration has a personal dimension. Inertia’s co-founder and chief scientist, Annie Kritcher, was a key architect of the NIF experiments that first reached breakeven. Policy changes under the CHIPS and Science Act opened the door for her to launch the company while continuing her work at the lab, tightening the link between public science and private commercialization.