Some fusion companies may play a rough situation, but Realta Fusion reverses the trend with a new fundraising round.

“At the end of the Series A investment period, we’ve already said, ‘Hey, we have a design. We’re ready to go build anvils,” Realta’s co-founder and CEO Kieran Furlong told TechCrunch.

Furlong said the company hopes to make enough progress this year and the next to invest in investor in Series B, which will be used to build anvil prototypes.

Realta has raised $36 million under future Ventures leadership, including Avila VC, Gsbackers, Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, Siteground, Titletowntech and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The startup previously raised $9 million in seed rounds, led by Khosla Ventures. Last summer, it flipped the switch over a pair of magnets and set a record for the magnetic field that limits the plasma in two weeks.

Fusion has long been proposed as a clean energy source, but so far, only one experiment has been able to reach a major milestone called Scientific leakeven, which describes how much energy fusion reaction is expected to be released. The results are still far below what scientists expect from commercial converged power plants.

Still, many scientists and engineers are optimistic that commercial convergence power plants will be feasible sometime in the next decade. Realta is one of them.

The startup hopes to be able to build power plants cheaply to provide electricity at $100 per megawatt-hour, with the hope of reducing it to $40 per megawatt-hour when refining its technology. Lazard said the most efficient gas power plants today are around $45 to $105 for construction and operation.

Real estate operators set out from the University of Wisconsin three years ago. Since then, a team of 18 people has now been developing a reactor concept with university scientists that has been debated for decades.

The concept is called a magnetic mirror, confining plasma to a symmetrical bottle shape. The powerful magnets on both ends knead high-energy particles called plasma, pushing them toward the center. As the magnetic field is towards the center, the magnetic field expands, and the weaker magnet helps to form a plasma cylinder in the middle. To expand the reactor output, the company can add more middle sections, which should be cheaper to manufacture because of the smaller magnet function.

If the magnet works as expected, the plasma will reach high temperatures long enough that the particles will begin to fuse, thereby releasing a lot of energy in the process.

Realta is one of the few convergence startups that have emerged in Wisconsin in recent years. As energy demand for data centers grows in the region, including Microsoft facilities near Foxconn’s infamous projects, Badger State Politicans has begun deliberating legislation to lure the nuclear industry, including convergence and fission.

"The state legislature is definitely paying attention," Furlong said. "We've talked to both sides and we think it's an opportunity to do bipartisan work here."

Ultimately, Realta and the rest of the convergence industry need to be trained in the next few years to achieve their plans and prove that convergence is feasible if everything goes well.

"We already have the Gartner hype cycle. We're a little off the other end right now," Furlong said.

"What we want to avoid is seeing some companies blow up and destroy the rest of the industry in shock," he said. "We want everyone to succeed. We all want the convergence to succeed. I think we all know we have 40 or 50 companies working on it now. Obviously, not everyone can survive."