Fusion is one of those categories where everyone agrees it’s important, but very few are willing to underwrite the journey. You’re paying for long timelines, capital intensity, and extreme technical risk.
Yet here we are.
Announced to the public just a few hours ago, and with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon on-site, OpenStar demonstrated something that no private fusion company has done before: it floated a 500kg superconducting magnet confining plasma. Suspending half a tonne of superconducting mass while containing ultra hot plasma is a major step toward sustained fusion energy. For a company that began as a bold architectural thesis, this wasn’t incremental progress, it was proof that the core physics can be engineered.
In just three years, OpenStar has gone from idea to levitated plasma, along the way building out the strongest fusion team in the Southern Hemisphere and attracting global attention.
So as OpenStar’s first investors, what did we get right, get wrong, or simply get lucky with?
1. A differentiated technical approach. OpenStar isn’t building incrementally improving legacy designs. The levitated dipole concept is bold and underexplored, yet theoretically elegant; and also simpler and more stable at scale.
We believed that if fusion is going to work in the private sector, it might come from a design that’s structurally different. We got this right in spirit. What we underestimated was just how compelling that differentiation would become when recruiting top-tier physicists and engineers both domestically and offshore. OpenStar's core architecture itself became a magnet for talent.
2. Founder-market fit. Ratu and the founding team combine deep technical credibility with unusual execution bias. They knew they weren’t running a research lab, they were building a company. In frontier deep tech, this matters enormously. Founders can be right on physics and still fail on company building.
We got this right, but we didn’t yet know how important the cultural tone would be. OpenStar has consistently moved faster than most people think a fusion company “should” be able to and on such a lean burn rate, too.
3. New Zealand as a fusion base. We believed New Zealand is an advantage: globally-trained engineering talent, lower burn, regulatory flexibility, and the ability to build quietly without the noise of a U.S. fusion arms race.
We were right, mostly. The ecosystem has enabled scrappiness and focus, but we definitely underestimated how much effort it would take to convince global capital that a proper fusion company was being built in Middle Earth.
“Fusion is always 20 years away.” Every fusion investor is confronted by this sentence. But in our view, while that’s historically true, it’s increasingly lazy analysis. Superconductors have improved. Simulation tools have improved. Private capital has created speed and accountability that government programs alone didn’t have. We believed timelines could compress not because physics changed, but because execution momentum did.
Still too early to declare victory, sure, but the velocity so far gives us confidence.
Capital intensity risk. Fusion hardware is expensive and iteration cycles are long. We believed that staged technical milestones paired with disciplined capital strategy could derisk the journey enough to attract aligned investors at each step. We underestimated how much storytelling and education would be required to prove clean sheet design differentiation over incremental improvement.
Competition from well-funded U.S. fusion players. Billions have gone into the category, but our bet was that fusion is not winner-take-all at this stage. Multiple architectures can coexist, and highly-differentiated approaches are more valuable than incremental ones. So far, that thesis holds. The field is big enough [and the problem important enough] for multiple shots on goal.
What we didn’t fully appreciate early on was how hard and slow some of the non-technical pieces would be. Recruiting globally into a fusion company from New Zealand takes meaningful effort. Educating technical investors on a less familiar fusion architecture takes repetition, and building conviction in a field with decades of skepticism requires years-long patience.
For other business models, traction is obvious. In fusion, progress can look invisible unless you know where to look. Fusion still carries enormous uncertainty, and that hasn’t changed...yet.
Speed matters, even in fusion. OpenStar has operated with a tempo that feels closer to a startup than a national lab. We’re talking rapid prototyping with fast hiring decisions and clear milestones at each stage. In fusion, speed compounds just like in software, but it just compounds over years instead of quarters.
Ambition attracts capital. We believed that truly ambitious technical missions don’t repel investors; they just filter them into technical enthusiasts who embrace asymmetric risk. The Seed round required conviction, which Outset had since day one, and subsequent capital required evidence to onlooking investors. Outset General Partner Angus Blair's board position since the Seed round enabled him to advocate for OpenStar both domestically and offshore. Each milestone communicated across the mission sold has gone on to expand the circle of believers and attract global attention.
The founding team turned out to be top 1% operators, not just top 10% technologists. Technical excellence is table stakes in deep tech, but what’s rare is founders who can also recruit world-class people, raise capital in difficult markets, and make hard calls under sustained uncertainty across years. That combination doesn’t come along often, and we knew it when we saw it. At Outset, we spend a lot of time thinking about founder endurance, and with OpenStar, we found it.
OpenStar is still early, but is miles ahead in an sector that grows across decade-long arcs. Since leading their Seed round, the trajectory has validated a simple belief at Outset:
If you’re going to take technical risk, take asymmetric technical risk.
Back the teams attempting the things that, if they work, change the structure of the world. At Outset, we invest in companies that can shift industries. OpenStar is attempting to shift the energy foundation of civilization, and that’s the kind of risk worth underwriting.
Momentum Fund I, Outset's opportunity fund focused on series A/B breakout deep tech companies in New Zealand, is now live. Visit outset.ventures/momentum.