On October 9, 2024, ARPA-E awardee Zap Energy announced the commencement of operations for Century, their new high-rep-rate, liquid-metal-cooled fusion test platform. In addition, the company closed a $130 million Series D funding round led by Soros Fund Management LLC, with participation from new investors including BAM Elevate, Emerson Collective, Leitmotif, Mizuho Financial Group, Plynth Energy, and Xplor Ventures.

Century represents the first fully integrated demonstration of several fusion power plant-relevant technologies, including one of the largest tests of a plasma-facing liquid metal blanket to date. The platform has already demonstrated a test run of more than 1,000 consecutive plasmas in less than three hours into a chamber lined with flowing liquid metal. 

The new funding will support parallel development of both plasma R&D and systems-level plant engineering and integration, including the next generation in the company's FuZE device series and a cutting-edge pulsed power capacitor bank. Zap Energy is now working towards a milestone outlined in the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, with hopes to achieve it by the end of the year.

"ARPA-E's support has been instrumental in Zap Energy's progress towards commercial fusion power," said Zap Energy CEO Benj Conway. "With Century now operational and our recent funding round, we're well-positioned to continue our parallel approach of advancing both plasma physics and power plant engineering simultaneously." 

Zap Energy's fusion approach, known as a sheared-flow-stabilized Z pinch, offers several advantages: The first is that it avoids large superconducting magnets and powerful lasers. Furthermore, it is significantly smaller than conventional systems and aims to generate net energy by satisfying fusion’s triple product: reaching a necessary temperature, density, and confinement time. This technology offers compelling fusion economics and requires significantly less capital than conventional approaches.

ARPA-E originally funded the University of Washington as they initially pursued scale-up of their shear-flow-stabilized Z pinch approach under the ARPA-E ALPHA program. From this funding, Zap Energy was spun off, and furthered performance improvements under the ARPA-E OPEN 2018 program and the ARPA-E BETHE program. To date, Zap Energy has raised over $330M in total funding.