
Thea Energy's CEO has an engineer's eye, an investor's discipline, and a decidedly practical question for fusion: what if the difficult part could move from sculpted metal into software?
Thea Energy is a New Jersey fusion power company building a simplified, mass-manufacturable stellarator. Instead of the exotic, millimeter-precise 3D magnet coils that defined earlier stellarators, Thea uses arrays of small, planar high-temperature-superconductor electromagnets steered by software - shifting complexity from hardware fabrication to control code. Spun out of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 2022, the company is building Eos, a neutron-source stellarator meant to prove power-plant-relevant performance and generate near-term revenue, ahead of its first commercial plant, Helios.