Latest news with #Anvil
TechCrunch
13-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Realta Fusion taps $36M in fresh funds for its fusion-in-a-bottle reactor
Some fusion companies might be hitting a rough patch, but Realta Fusion is bucking the trend with a new fundraising round it says will allow it to finalize the design of its Anvil prototype reactor. 'By the end of our Series A investment period, we'll have said, 'Hey, we have a design. We're shovel ready to go and build Anvil,'' Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta, told TechCrunch. The company hopes to make sufficient progress this year and next so it can pitch investors on a Series B, which would go toward building the Anvil prototype, Furlong said. Realta raised $36 million in a round led by Future Ventures with participation from other investors, including Avila VC, GSBackers, Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, SiteGround, TitletownTech, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The startup previously raised $9 million in a seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Last summer, it flipped the switch on a pair of magnets and, within two weeks, set a record for a magnetic field confining a plasma. Fusion has long been proposed as a clean energy source, but so far, only one experiment has been able to hit a major milestone known as scientific breakeven, which describes how much energy fusion reactions are expected to release. That result was still far below what scientists expect a commercial fusion power plant to require. Still, many scientists and engineers are optimistic that commercial fusion power plants will be viable sometime in the next decade. Realta's are among them. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW The startup hopes to build power plants cheaply enough to supply power at $100 per megawatt-hour initially with an eye toward lowering that to $40 per megawatt-hour as it refines its technology. Today, the most efficient natural gas power plants cost around $45 to $105 per megawatt-hour to build and run, according to Lazard. Realta spun out of the University of Wisconsin three years ago. Since then, the team, which is now 18 people, has been working alongside university scientists to develop a reactor concept that's been debated for decades. The concept, known as a magnetic mirror, confines plasma in a symmetrical bottle shape. Powerful magnets at both ends pinch high-energy particles known as plasma, pushing it back toward the center. The magnetic fields expand as they head toward the center, where weaker magnets help form a plasma cylinder in the middle. To scale the reactor's output, the company can add more middle sections, which should be cheaper to manufacture because of the less powerful magnets. If the magnets work as expected, the plasma will reach incredibly high temperatures for long enough that the particles will start to fuse, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. Realta is one of a handful of fusion startups that have emerged in Wisconsin in recent years. As energy demands for data centers have ramped up in the region — including a forthcoming Microsoft facility near Foxconn's infamous project — Badger State politicians have begun mulling legislation to lure the nuclear industry, both fusion and fission. 'The state legislature is definitely paying attention,' Furlong said. 'We've talked to both sides, and we think this is an opportunity for bipartisan work here.' Ultimately, Realta and the rest of the fusion industry need to muscle through the coming years to bring their plans to fruition and, if all goes well, prove that fusion power is viable. 'We've had the Gartner hype cycle. We're kind of coming down the other side now,' Furlong said, referring to a tech industry theory that outlines the adoption and reception of new technologies. 'What we want to avoid is seeing a few companies blow up spectacularly and spoil it for the rest of the industry,' he said. 'We wish everyone success. We all want fusion to succeed. I think we all recognize we've got 40 or 50 companies working on it right now. Obviously, not all of them will survive.'
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Anduril beat 9 competitors to snag a $642 million anti-drone contract for the US Marine Corps
Palmer Luckey's startup Anduril scored a $642 million deal for anti-drone tech in Marine Corps bases. The 10-year contract is meant to help fight smaller drones like the exploding ones in Ukraine. The Defense Department said Anduril was chosen out of 10 total bids. Defense startup Anduril clinched a $642 million contract on Friday to help the US Marine Corps fight smaller drones at its bases. Anduril's new deal is for the Marine Corps Installation-Counter small Unmanned Aircraft Systems program, which is essentially a network of anti-drone defenses for bases and facilities. The announcement comes after Anduril scored a separate five-year $200 million agreement in November to bring counter-drone tech to the Marine Air Defense Integrated System. This mobile air defense system can be mounted on vehicles like Humvees. Like with the MADIS, Anduril's offering for this new contract is to fight smaller drones, which the US military classifies as Group 1 and Group 2. Such drones are typically no heavier than 55 pounds and fly at a maximum altitude of about 3,500 feet, like the exploding commercial drones used in the war in Ukraine. When the Corps first opened its contract in April 2024, it warned of a "security capability gap" for dealing with these smaller drones at its bases. "The sUAS threat poses unique challenges to military installations when compared to those of operational forces," the Corps wrote. The Defense Department said on Friday that 10 companies had submitted proposals for the contract. With Anduril scoring the deal, the department said that 80% of the work until 2035 would be done in Costa Mesa, California, home to Anduril's headquarters. The rest is expected to be performed in Washington, D.C., and other Marine Corps facilities. The announcement did not specify what type of product or how many systems Anduril will deliver. Press teams for Anduril and the Marine Corps did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider outside regular business hours. One of Anduril's main offerings for fighting smaller drones, Anvil, features a quadcopter that flies out from a portable storage box to track and crash into enemy systems. It can also be fitted with explosives to attack bigger targets. Additionally, the company sells electronic warfare jammers called Pulsar, which it's already providing to the Pentagon as part of a $250 million deal from October. Anduril, founded in 2017 by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey, has become a rising star in the defense industry as it emphasizes ready-made designs that can be produced at scale. In that sense, it hopes to reuse the same design to bid for multiple contracts instead of creating each one specifically for a single deal. The firm is also working with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and runs its products on an AI software called Lattice to survey the battlefield and identify threats. One of its biggest scores so far is a $22 billion contract with the US Army to provide soldiers with mixed-reality goggles. The contract was originally awarded to Microsoft but later ceded to Anduril. The firm hopes to expand quickly. In August, Anduril raised $1.5 billion to build a 5 million-square-foot factory in Ohio that it said would "hyperscale" production. Read the original article on Business Insider
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The week in classical: Il Trovatore; Total Immersion: Symphonic Electronics; Mad Song; Jerusalem Quartet
In we go, through the gaping jaws of hell into an apocalypse of eternal damnation straight out of medieval imagery. Nothing is comfortable in the Royal Opera's staging of Il Trovatore. That front curtain hell-mouth acts as a grim, faintly comic warning: Adele Thomas's 2023 production, back for the first time (revival director Simon Iorio), exposes Verdi's 1853 opera in all its anarchy. Naturalism, doubtful anyway with a plot that includes sinister curses and a mother mistakenly throwing her baby on the fire, is out. Beneath the convention of set-piece choruses and magnificent coloratura arias, transgression holds sway. In Annemarie Woods's designs, the 15th-century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch provides a touchstone. No surprise to see humans in animal skulls, cavorting and thwacking to that famous, harmonically slithering melody we call the Anvil chorus (Coro di Zingari). Horned goblins pop through trap doors, squirming up and down the stairs, which, fixed within three large frames, fill an otherwise empty stage. Chorus and cast (choreography by Emma Woods) must deliver every detail of the story in sharp focus. On first night, momentum was elusive initially, the conductor Giacomo Sagripanti pausing for applause that might not automatically have come, and with some dropped stitches in ensemble between stage and pit. Once Agnieszka Rehlis appeared, as the vengeful Azucena, the pace quickened, uncertainty receded. The Polish mezzo soprano, fearless in urgency and despair, held histrionics in tight rein (a contrast to Jamie Barton's no-holds-barred Azucena in 2023, equally compelling but different). As Count di Luna, the Russian baritone Aleksei Isaev, sometimes overshadowed in ensembles, shone in his big aria 'Il balen', in which Luna's thwarted love for the noble Leonora shows Verdi at his most compassionate. The American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen was rich-toned and assured in negotiating the taxing range, vocally and emotionally, of Leonora, in love with the troubadour-rebel of the title, Manrico. The star American tenor Michael Fabiano excels in this Italian repertoire, silky toned and ardent. Manrico's battle cry aria 'Di quella pira', full of high-note risk, had exciting, pulsating energy, in the orchestra, too. His final duet with Azucena was lyrical and intense. This is brave and powerful theatre, easy neither for performers or audience. It leaves you rattled: surely what Verdi wanted. The BBC Symphony Orchestra's latest all-day Total Immersion, called Symphonic Electronics, was an exploration of music using electronics old and new, with a glimpse at an AI future. Since the greatest work featured, Tristan Murail's 'spectral' classic Gondwana (1980), is for large orchestra with no electronics, there's a challenge in summing up the porous boundaries of this extravaganza. A UK premiere by Steven Daverson (b 1985), Figures Outside a Dacha, with Snowfall, and an Abbey in the Background, used live electronics to pay homage to the film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. Daverson's inspiration was the final shot of Tarkovsky's 1983 film Nostalgia, which shows a man, a dog, a pool, an abbey, then snow starts falling. It would not be true to say this was immediately clear on listening, though the spatial effects of synthesised bells, mournful brass refrains and amplified saxophone, guitar and other instruments created a haunting, slow-moving avalanche of sound. The other premiere, Bab-Khaneh: Gatehouse of Memory, was a BBC commission by the British-Iranian composer Shiva Feshareki (b 1987). Its starting point was the Barbican itself: a sonic survey of the building's acoustics and design. At the same time, her piece required a complete reinvention of the hall's natural sound through the positioning of an orchestra of loudspeakers – her words – to make a 360-degree surround sound system. Positioned behind her turntable deck, she plays the hall as an instrument, 'sculpting my spatial turntable performance' live in the moment. The BBC Symphony Orchestra played mainly sustained, slow notes, which may have tested their patience. Whether you respond to boulders of sound blasting around the hall at high volume, with a lighting design in winking colours, now like glow-worms, now orbs, now searchlights, is a matter of sensory resilience. I was ready to apologise to the friend I persuaded to go – 50 minutes begins to feel epic, in any medium, even Mahler – but they loved the whole thing. It certainly acts as a 'web of memory', as Feshareki intends. Out of the electroacoustic edifices, songs flickered to the fore, evocative shreds of aural balm: from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Paul McCartney and Wings's My Love, Foreigner's 80s hit Waiting for a Girl Like You and the Iranian song Gole Sangam. Listen out for the broadcast on a future edition of Radio 3's New Music Show. A mono smart speaker may not have the same effect as the entire, multi-channelled Barbican hall, but there's time to re-rig your house in preparation. On a small scale, in overlapping spectral territory, I must mention the newish, six-strong ensemble Mad Song, who gave an enterprising programme at the October Gallery: two premieres – by Thomas Metcalf (b 1996) and Jean-Louis Agobet (b 1968) – and two 20th-century works, by Elliott Carter and Gérard Grisey. Metcalf's Photogenia looks back to a photographic process pioneered by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s: delicate whirrings and tappings fade or grow like Talbot's ghostly silhouettes on light-sensitive paper. To say it left an impression is not intended as clever wordplay: it did. These expert young players deserve to reach a wider audience. The 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) is in spate, as demonstrated by cycles of his 15 string quartets, at Milton Court and Wigmore Hall, running in near parallel. In the second of the Jersualem Quartet's Wigmore series (they return in June), the group played the fourth, fifth and sixth quartets. The cellist's twice-broken string notwithstanding, these were brilliantly detailed performances, at once acidic and melancholy. Founded in 1993, the ensemble is characterised by a viola player capable, in resonance and volume, of creating a true bridge between the two violins and the cello. Ori Kam plays a modern instrument by the famed American maker Hiroshi Iizuka. Kam has likened its response to putting your foot down on a Maserati. I wouldn't know, but I've never heard anything quite like it. Star ratings (out of five) Il Trovatore ★★★Total Immersion: Symphonic Electronics ★★★Mad Song ★★★★Jerusalem Quartet ★★★★ Il Trovatore is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 19 July
