India’s first fusion power company takes key steps

If all goes according to plan, India may firm up designs for its first privately built tokamak, a nuclear reactor that uses fusion to produce power, in 2027.

Bengaluru-based startup Pranos Fusion has built PRAGYA, a small donut-shaped tokamak, to test plasma actuation and superconducting magnets. This is the gateway to the construction of PRANIK, a much larger tokomak that will have plasma heated to millions of degrees—more than the interior of the Sun—necessary to fuse hydrogen atoms and create energy.

“By 2027, we expect to complete the plan for PRANIK and be on our way to building a practical reactor that can produce power. The ability to actually produce electricity from fusion is the next step,” said Shaurya Kaushal, co-founder and CEO of Pranos Fusion.

The company is currently incubated from the Institute of Plasma Research, a body affiliated with the Ministry of Atomic Energy and the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bengaluru, an institute with the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Nuclear power plants everywhere use fission – a chain reaction involving uranium nuclei to generate heat, which is used to generate electricity. Fusion, on the other hand, releases energy when light atomic nuclei fuse, and usually involves fusing two forms of hydrogen—deuterium and tritium—into helium and a fast neutron. However, this requires the fuel to be heated to around 100 million degrees Celsius, far more than any solid wall could withstand. In tokamaks, strong magnets keep this superheated plasma away from the walls, keeping it hot enough for fusion to continue.

Pranos Fusion was one of the deeptech startups featured at the Emerging Science Technology and Innovation Conclave held here last week.

“Fusion reactor electricity is still a long way off and would be expensive now, but the need for any power source is only going to grow,” said Roshan George, co-founder and computer science engineer at Manipal Institute of Technology. “The advantage of fusion is that even though (it’s) nuclear power, it doesn’t need radioactive material like uranium. India already produces a lot of deuterium. Fusion reactions are also not chain reactions, so the risk of a fast reaction (as in a fission reactor) is almost non-existent,” Mr George said.

The largest tokamak under construction is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France, a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the US. It is designed to produce about 10 times the heating power delivered to its plasma. Beset by delays, the 2024 revision moved the start of research operations to 2034 and full operation of deuterium and tritium to 2039, increasing costs by around €5 billion. IPR manages India’s domestic tokamak reactors, including ADITYA and Steady State Tokamak (SST-1). It is also the nodal domestic agency that manages India’s contributions to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

The price of a private tokamak depends on the scale, Mr. Kaushal, who holds a Ph.D. from JNCASR and a mechanical engineering degree from BITS Pilani, he said. A compact research machine like PRAGYA is a “relatively modest investment”, while a machine designed for net energy gain is much larger. Private merger companies worldwide have raised over $13 billion, he said, and the leading net profit programs have each raised hundreds of millions of dollars or more.

Pranos Fusion says compact machines, HTS (high temperature superconducting) magnets and an Indian manufacturing base can reduce costs substantially. It is backed by Ankur Capital, pi Ventures and Industrial47 and has raised $7.2 million. HTS electromagnets are wound from materials that, when cooled below a critical temperature, transmit electric current without resistance.

Britain’s JET tokamak produced a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy in 2023, though less than the heating output delivered. In December 2022, the US National Ignition Facility, which uses lasers rather than magnets, achieved ignition, releasing more fusion energy than the laser light delivered to the fuel. However, this does not include the electricity required to run the lasers. Magnets made from high-temperature superconductors (HTS) have achieved fields of around 20 tesla in tests, making smaller machines with stronger fields feasible.

In an email, Mr. Kaushal said the company is structured so that its technology generates value before there is a power plant. It has two platforms — JENGA, a simulation, design and control software that acts as the machine’s digital twin, and MAGGA, its HTS magnet program.

Published – 31 Oct 2026 19:16 IST