Pranos Fusion is building the machinery India would need to generate power from fusion

Pranos Fusion, a Bengaluru startup founded in 2024, has raised about $7.22 million across two rounds to build the industrial hardware and software stack for nuclear fusion, per YourStory. The company is not trying to solve the physics of fusion — it is building the machinery that would surround a working reactor.

The most recent raise was a $6.8 million round in March 2026, co-led by pi Ventures and Ankur Capital, with Industrial47 returning as a backer. Angels joining the round included Groww co-founder Lalit Keshre and the founders of Razorpay and Bhukhanwala Industries. Before that, the company raised about Rs 3.5 crore in pre-seed funding from Industrial47 and received a Rs 20 lakh grant from the Startup India Seed Fund. Total capital raised now stands at roughly $7.22 million, according to YourStory, going toward a team of about eight people, testing facilities, and three technology tracks.

The company's product stack has three components. JENGA is a plasma-control and design platform — a digital twin that couples plasma physics to plant engineering, allowing configurations to be tested in simulation before hardware is built. MAGGA covers high-temperature superconducting magnets, which confine the plasma; stronger magnets allow a smaller machine, which is a core reason compact fusion has become more tractable over the past decade. PRAGYA is a compact spherical tokamak — a doughnut-shaped magnetic confinement device with a low aspect ratio that is harder to engineer than classical designs but cheaper to build. In August 2026, Pranos said it had completed India's first privately developed tokamak; it is targeting a first plasma milestone before the end of the year, a separate and more demanding step than assembling the machine.

The two founders bring complementary backgrounds. CEO Shaurya Kaushal holds a doctorate in computational physics from JNCASR and an engineering degree from BITS Pilani, and has worked with the UK Atomic Energy Authority and CSIR-CEERI. COO Roshan George comes from computer science and spent years building digital platforms for the energy industry. The company is co-incubated at the Institute for Plasma Research — which operates India's existing tokamaks — and at JNCASR, and its plasma control systems are being developed with a view to eventual deployment on IPR's machines. Hardware manufacturing is handled through third-party partners in Bengaluru, Pune, and Chennai.

The broader fusion landscape provides context for the scale of the ambition and the funding gap. Laboratories have produced sustained fusion plasmas — China's tokamak held one for 1,066 seconds and France's WEST reactor broke that record at 1,377 seconds — but the industrial supply chain to turn those experiments into grid-connected power plants does not yet exist. As YourStory notes, Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion Energy have each raised billions of dollars and have not yet achieved net energy output. Pranos has raised $7 million and is explicitly positioning itself not as a competitor in that race but as a builder of the underlying infrastructure those reactors — and any future Indian fusion program — would require.

The company's next stated milestone is achieving first plasma in its PRAGYA tokamak this year. Beyond that, its plasma control work with IPR's existing machines would serve as a near-term proving ground before any commercial deployment.