Can MIFTI, a scrappy UC Irvine-based startup, outpace billion-dollar fusion giants?
The event lasts a fraction of a microsecond. There’s no thunderclap. No blinding glow. There’s just a pulse of current and a sudden compression. If everything goes right, a burst of neutrons sprays outward, evidence that atoms have fused and that, for an instant, a star has come to life on Earth.
For decades physicists tried to stabilize this method, known as the Z-pinch. By the 1960s most had moved on to other designs. Dr. Hafiz Rahman did not. He’s convinced the problem is solvable. That conviction, rooted in his research at UC Irvine, evolved into the fusion startup MIFTI (Magneto-Inertial Fusion Technologies, Inc.), where he continues pursuing a line of research many physicists left behind.
Finding Stability
Fusion works by forcing light atoms together until a fraction of their mass converts into energy. In stars, gravity provides the force. On Earth, scientists try to recreate that pressure with powerful electrical pulses, magnets, or lasers. Rahman, MIFTI’s president and chief scientist, and his team are pursuing a method known as the Z-pinch, one of the earliest serious approaches to fusion energy.
The premise behind it is rather simple. Heat a tube of gas until it becomes plasma, a hot, charged state of matter. Then drive a powerful electric current through it. The current creates a magnetic field that wraps around the plasma and compresses it inward, forcing it to the extreme temperatures and densities required for fusion. It’s simple, at least if you are a nuclear physicist.
In early experiments, when researchers compressed the plasma, it rippled and tore itself apart, destroying the symmetry required for sustained fusion. After that, the field moved on to more elaborate schemes like doughnut-shaped tokamaks, superconducting magnets, and stadium-sized laser systems. The Z-pinch became somewhat of a footnote in fusion history until Rahman encountered it in the 1980s after joining UC Irvine’s Department of Physics as a researcher. He worked alongside the late Norman Rostoker, a pioneering nuclear physicist whose ideas helped shape modern fusion research, and Amnon Fisher, who together developed a variation known as the gas-puff Z-pinch. They experimented with a burst of gas and sent electricity through it. The design was elegant and compact. It was also still unstable.
Then one day Rahman saw something different. He saw plasma that, instead of shredding, remained smooth at its core.
“When I saw the target was uniformly stable,” Rahman recalls, “I was thrilled. I told Norman, ‘This is the central problem in fusion. We have to publish this.’ He agreed immediately. That’s how it began.”
Rahman and his collaborators refined the approach into the staged Z-pinch. They surrounded the fuel with a heavier outer layer of plasma. When that outer layer collapses inward, it sends a stabilizing shock through the inner fuel, helping it compress more smoothly. By squeezing it in stages, the system delays the turbulence that would otherwise tear the reaction apart.
The Stakes
The stakes are enormous. If controlled, fusion could provide a virtually limitless source of carbon-free energy. One of fusion’s primary fuels, deuterium, is a heavy form of hydrogen that can be extracted from seawater. That means the fuel supply is abundant and cheap. In theory, a few grams could release as much energy as thousands of gallons of oil.
The nuclear plants operating today rely on the opposite process: fission. Instead of joining light atoms, fission splits heavy ones apart, triggering a chain reaction that must be constantly managed. When cooling systems fail, heat can build and, in rare cases, spiral into disasters like Chernobyl or Fukushima. Fusion, on the other hand, does not depend on a self-sustaining chain reaction. The temperatures required are so extreme that if conditions falter, the reaction simply stops.
Today, roughly 82% of the world’s energy still comes from coal, gas and oil and demand is rising. Data centers now consume electricity at industrial scales. The newest AI systems require as much power as small cities. And if economic development is to continue globally, energy use will increase as more nations build hospitals, factories and infrastructure. The challenge is no longer whether to generate more power. It’s whether we can do so without destabilizing the planet.
Rahman does not mince words about the stakes.
“We’ve already increased global temperatures about one degree,” he says. “When it reaches two degrees, there will be no going back.” The urgency is clear.
“We had the most neutron yield of anybody in the world, for very, very little money.”
— Jerry Simmons
Lean Fusion
While Rahman had the physics, he didn’t have a vehicle to carry it forward. That changed when Gerald “Jerry” Simmons, MIFTI’s Executive Chairman, saw a path forward. The science was one challenge. Financing it was another.
Simmons is a serial entrepreneur who once built multi-user computer systems for the government. He met Rostoker socially in the early 1990s and, like many before him, found it hard to escape fusion’s pull.
“I’ve been working in fusion for about 30 years,” Simmons says, “and I’m probably the only person in the world that’s officially founded two private fusion companies.”
The first was Tri Alpha Energy, now TAE Technologies, another UC Irvine fusion company based on Rostoker’s research. There he helped bring in early backing from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures. After founding Tri Alpha Energy, Rostoker introduced Simmons to Rahman’s staged Z-pinch work.
“I really thought that since we’d successfully launched one fusion company, this would be easy. Boy, was I wrong,” Simmons says, laughing.
When he co-founded TAE in 1998, fusion startups were rare. TAE was among the first commercial fusion ventures backed largely by private capital. By the time Simmons and Rahman launched MIFTI a decade later with Mohammed Arshad, the landscape had shifted. Fusion was no longer a lonely bet.
Long before MIFTI formally became a company, Arshad, an entrepreneur and MIFTI’s COO/CFO, had already taken an interest in Rahman’s staged Z-pinch research. At the time, the work sat well outside the mainstream of private fusion investment. Arshad, who had built companies across several industries, saw potential not only in the physics but in the possibility of advancing it through a leaner development model. When Simmons later joined to help build the company, the two helped shape MIFTI’s operating approach. Instead of building massive in-house facilities, MIFTI ran experiments at national laboratories and university sites, renting time on equipment that already existed. The approach allowed the company to test its ideas without the massive early capital required by many fusion startups.
The results they produced at those rented facilities were hard to dismiss. MIFTI secured a $6 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E, the U.S. Department of Energy program that funds high-risk, high-impact energy technologies too early for private investors. The grant allowed MIFTI to put its theory to the test.
In fusion research, performance is measured by the number of neutrons released during the reaction. The more neutrons, the more fusion reactions are occurring. In that experiment, Rahman says MIFTI produced more neutrons than any other ARPA-E–funded project, an early signal that their approach was competitive. More recently at a nuclear power facility in San Leandro, California, MIFTI achieved neutron yields exceeding 10¹¹.
“We had the most neutron yield of anybody in the world,” Simmons says, “for very, very little money.”
The next machine MIFTI plans to use, housed at the same facility in San Leandro, is a far more powerful successor. Rahman believes they could achieve scientific break-even—the point at which the fusion fuel releases more energy than it absorbs. Rahman says it would mark more than a technical milestone. It could signal that the physics works and that the company’s low-cost strategy might scale. It would also be the moment when more investors take notice.
Anticipating that shift, MIFTI’s board recently appointed Mihir Worah, Ph.D., a former chief investment officer at PIMCO, as CEO to help steer the company toward the marketplace. The strategy he inherits is straightforward. MIFTI’s wager is that simplicity scales. A staged Z-pinch machine will be compact by design and could be produced without multibillion-dollar price tags. They’re betting that a compact, repeatable design can move faster, and at lower cost, than the mega-projects that dominate the field.
“Analysts have pegged fusion as a $40 trillion industry,” Simmons says. “That’s not just a market opportunity. That’s a reshaping of the global economy. When you’re talking about numbers like that, it’s a race with serious competition.”
The competition is not just the startup down the road. Fusion has become a matter of national strategy, particularly in China, where it is tied to long-term energy security and industrial policy. If fusion becomes foundational to future power systems, the countries that master it first could define the next era of industrial power.
“Machines that could fit in an office conference room could be used to supply medicine to every hospital in the world.”
— Dr. Hafiz Rahman
Nuclear Medicine
Even the most bullish projections put full-scale fusion power plants decades away. Building reactors that can reliably feed electricity into the grid will require years of engineering advances and enormous capital. With that reality in mind, MIFTI has turned to a nearer-term application: nuclear medicine.
Fusion reactions can do more than release energy. Their neutrons can be used to create radioactive isotopes, unstable atoms that emit radiation and are widely used in cancer imaging and therapies. At present, most of the world’s supply comes from a handful of aging nuclear reactors, many of them abroad. Since many isotopes decay rapidly, sometimes within hours, proximity to patients is critical to maintaining a stable supply.
This is where MIFTI’s compact design becomes strategically important. A staged Z-pinch system could be built at a fraction of the cost and footprint of a more traditional reactor. In principle, the machines could be installed near hospitals or regional medical centers, decentralizing isotope production and reducing dependence on distant facilities.
“Machines that could fit in an office conference room could be used to supply medicine to every hospital in the world,” Rahman says.
If the economics hold, MIFTI’s system is not just cheaper, but also more deployable. It opens the possibility of distributed production rather than centralized scarcity. If fusion power is the moonshot, medical isotopes may be the first scalable application along the way. Rahman doesn’t hedge when discussing the company’s near-term prospects.
“I’m 99% positive that MIFTI will produce nuclear medicine,” he says.
Revenue from isotope production would not only strengthen global medical supply chains. It could also finance the company’s larger ambition: building machines powerful enough to move from supplying hospitals to supplying the grid.
The Blessing of a University
Fusion has humbled generations of physicists. It has also attracted true believers, pragmatists and opportunists in equal measure. For much of its history, fusion was not an entrepreneurial endeavor but a university and government-backed project. Rahman came of age in that era.
“Back when I began doing research in ’70s and ’80s, this kind of research could only be done by government funding,” Rahman says. “At that time, that was the only resource.”
That support allowed universities like UC Irvine to nurture ideas that were too risky, too unfashionable or too distant from market return to attract private capital. The staged Z-pinch was one of those ideas. The company’s foundational patents were filed through the university. The early experiments were conducted in campus laboratories, and the relationship endures. Among the scientists working on the project is Vice President of Research and Development Dr. Emil Ruskov, who earned his Ph.D. in physics at UC Irvine and previously worked at TAE. Professor Jonathan Feng from UC Irvine’s Department of Physics and Astronomy serves on MIFTI’s scientific advisory board, and the company has hired UC Irvine alumni and postdoctoral researchers into its growing team. The institutional relationship remains strong, but for Rahman, his ties to the university are deeply personal.
“Coming to UC Irvine was a blessing,” he says. “If I hadn’t come here and done that experiment, none of this would have happened.”