We sat down with Henry Gould, founder of Daedal Systems, to discuss the plasma diagnostics company he is building for the fusion industry and the case for treating measurement as a service.
Daedal Systems is a Toronto-based measurement systems company building an industrialized plasma diagnostics platform. Rather than handing fusion developers diagnostic hardware to operate themselves, it delivers robust, pre-qualified plasma measurements as an ongoing service, and stands behind those results as a third party. Gould founded the company after working in plasma diagnostics at General Fusion, where he served as technical project manager for the diagnostic suite on the company's Plasma Injector 3 machine.
Can you introduce Daedal Systems and tell us about the problem you've identified in the fusion industry?
Daedal Systems is a measurement systems company for the fusion energy industry, specifically a plasma diagnostics company. Every fusion company needs essentially the same plasma diagnostics, yet they all build them in-house, even though diagnostics aren't part of their core IP.
The reason comes down to where diagnostics sit on the roadmap. Fusion companies are building commercial powerplants, and an Nth-of-a-kind plant, once it works, won't need the broad diagnostic suite that R&D machines require today. Companies preferentially invest in core, reactor-relevant IP, which leads to an under-investment in diagnostics and lower-quality measurements than they could or should have.
Physicists, engineers, and strategists are all left working from worse information, which hurts productivity and ultimately delays fusion commercialization. Every actor is behaving rationally, and it's a structural industry problem that we're setting out to solve.
What specifically is Daedal Systems building for the fusion industry?
We are building an industrialized plasma diagnostics platform.
Given the breadth of fusion approaches being pursued, it's not a pure product-play—you can't build a widget that bolts onto every machine. Instead, we're building a set of diagnostic subsystems and a generalized data analysis layer (together: "the platform") that will enable us to deploy suites of robust, qualified plasma diagnostics on various machines.
Our specific innovation is in the industrial design of plasma diagnostics. That is, taking them from low technology-readiness systems found in labs today to deployable systems, engineered for high-dynamic range, accuracy and robustness. This includes things like auto-alignment of lasers, auto-calibration, data sheets that include error bars, etc. By developing a set of broadly applicable systems, fusion companies can receive pre-qualified diagnostic systems that work, as opposed to starting from scratch for each system.
We believe this will change the paradigm of plasma characterization. By enabling companies to have vastly greater information about their plasma, they'll be able to iterate much faster, and accelerate their path to commercialization.
You offer measurement as a service rather than diagnostic hardware. What does that change for a fusion company?
Anyone who has worked around plasma diagnostics knows how hard they are. They span nearly every technical discipline: plasma and measurement physics, mechanical, electronics and controls engineering, signal processing and computational software. A single diagnostic often takes over a year to design, build, commission, and work out bugs. Only then can a physicist start analyzing the data and actually driving plasma development forward.
Companies don't care how their measurements are made. They care about knowing what the plasma is doing: the temperature, density, magnetic field, etc., and then how to improve it to make their concept commercially viable. Offering measurement as a service means the line item of plasma measurement can be outsourced. Instead of being handed a hardware system and having to build a team to operate and maintain, customers get robust measurement infrastructure backed by a dedicated team. We guarantee comprehensive plasma characterization throughout machine operation.
Fast-turnaround and high-quality measurements ultimately enable focus. Physicists on plasma data analysis, engineers on reactor-relevant systems design, and leaders developing talent and core IP business units that drive valuations in the next financing round.
What role does third-party validation play in your offering to fusion companies?
Over the last few years, the industry has codified a set of milestones that define the trajectory of a successful fusion energy company, in large part stemming from Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems' 2024 open letter. It lays out six specific milestones:
- A stable plasma
- A hot plasma (1 keV)
- A high-performing plasma (achieved Lawson criterion)
- A net energy-producing plasma (Q > 1)
- A net energy-producing machine (first-of-a-kind powerplant)
- A fusion reactor producing a competitive levelized-cost-of-energy (commercially-viable fusion powerplants)
Fusion companies and investors are converging on a strategy of milestone-based financing: a deal to finance a specific milestone, achievement and validation of that milestone, and then a subsequent financing at a higher valuation for the next milestone.
Every fusion company today (with the exception of those building on NIF's laser-driven indirect drive) is working on milestones 1-4. Those milestones are explicitly measured with plasma diagnostics.
That means validation of plasma measurements is essential to fusion fundraising. Peer-reviewed results are the gold-standard, but the turnaround time of publications is incompatible with VC-fundraise timelines. More commonly, fusion companies or investors will hire technical diligence committees to review results, but these assessments are irregular.
We offer a structural solution. We're a 3rd-party taking measurements for fusion companies, and we're prepared to put our name publicly behind those results. This means as soon as results are achieved and measured with Daedal's diagnostics, companies can go public with 3rd-party-validation, and accelerate their next financing.
Industry stakeholders can see that our business success is predicated on being trustworthy. We are therefore incentivized to only put our name behind high-confidence measurements. This should put to rest concerns over conflicts of interest.
You've mentioned building for both magnetic and inertial confinement, starting on today's existing machines and moving toward the larger next-generation devices a couple of years out. How do you see that pathway unfolding?
That's right. Our intention is to build a platform to deploy measurement systems across the industry, from steady-state MCF to fast short-pulse time ICF. After all, no matter how fast your plasma lifetime, all fusion approaches produce neutrons, X-rays and gammas.
We can provide the most value today to companies with plasma machines that either already exist, or will be built in the next few years. Since those are primarily MCF devices, that's where we're starting. The step beyond that is Q > 1 devices and fusion power plant diagnostics, across both ICF and MCF.
I'll caveat the whole plan, though: we respond to fusion industry needs. If a subset of companies or approaches is ready to work with us sooner, we'll modify our roadmap to meet them.
Which diagnostics are you building first, and how did you decide where to start?
For reasons already described, we're starting with MCF diagnostics, and specifically with Thomson scattering and X-ray crystal spectroscopy.
Thomson Scattering has been the gold-standard electron temperature and density diagnostic ever since the 1960s.
It's a great story. In 1969, The Culham Five, a group of British physicists, crossed the iron curtain in the middle of the cold war to verify the Soviets' claim that their T-3 tokamak had indeed achieved the highest plasma performance ever recorded. Thomson Scattering confirmed the results, and tokamaks went on to be the most researched plasma device for the next several decades.
The reason Thomson Scattering is trusted is because it's independently calibrated. One doesn't need to infer results given several assumptions about impurities species, concentrations, etc. A physical phenomenon is directly measured, which directly corresponds to local electron temperature. It's for this reason that we're starting with Thomson Scattering.
X-ray Ion Doppler Spectroscopy is similarly a high-confidence measurement. With fewer radiation lines in the X-ray spectrum from common impurities, dopant impurity lines can be measured, and electron temperature, electron density and flow velocity extracted through various techniques.
Daedal is hiring physicists and engineers right now. Who are you looking for, and what's the case for joining at this stage?
Plasma diagnostics sit at the intersection of engineering and physics, and our specific mandate at Daedal Systems is to industrialize them—take them from low-technology readiness to engineered, deployable systems. As such, we're building out a team of diagnostic scientists and diagnostic engineers.
Diagnostic scientists are responsible for measurement and plasma physics—making the diagnostic work from a physics level. The engineering team is responsible for industrial development—turning them into reliable, deployable systems. We have several roles posted, and I encourage readers to check them out!
Our case is pretty straightforward. We are building the measurement infrastructure for the whole fusion industry. Diagnostic development at Daedal is highly leveraged, as your work is not just for one machine, it is for every machine. Fusion diagnostic scientists and engineers are a deeply motivated group of people looking to make an impact. Daedal allows them to do so on the largest scale.
Longer term, you've talked about expanding beyond fusion diagnostics into other industries. How do you see Daedal's trajectory over the next 5-10 years?
Today, Daedal Systems is a measurement systems company for the R&D phase of the fusion energy industry. Access to high-quality, fast turnaround plasma diagnostic measurements is a current and pressing problem for the industry, one that we are growing quickly to address. In the long term, we are going to provide fusion power plant instrumentation for every power plant that gets deployed around the world and potentially expand our suite of offerings within fusion.
But we recognize it's a long time horizon to a mature fusion power industry. In the medium term, we're going to take that R&D fusion diagnostic technology that we develop and apply it to mature industries or sooner-to-mature industries. We're specifically considering other plasma industrial processes, like semiconductor, as well as the SMR industry for neutron detection.
Daedal Systems is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Why Toronto?
Canada, and Ontario specifically, has a major structural advantage in the future fusion power industry: expertise in tritium systems.
Tritium is a by-product of our CANDU heavy-water reactors, a decades old Canadian technology. For years it was a radioactive waste by-product. It is also the essential fuel for the future fusion power industry. The global fusion industry is now looking to work with Canada and Ontario on tritium systems.
The federal and provincial governments have recognized this competitive advantage, and are actively looking to leverage it to develop a competitive fusion industry domestically. This has been initially formalized through the Centre for Fusion Energy in Ontario.
This Centre is specifically designed to build up companies like Daedal Systems domestically. Our bet is that by being one of the few fish in a small but quickly growing pond, we'll have an outsized advantage in non-dilutive capital access.
Additionally, Toronto has best-in-class talent from the University of Toronto, Waterloo and other institutions, we can accelerate visas for international talent, and, being outside one of the main fusion geographies (US, Europe, UK, Japan, China), we believe we can plausibly play the role of a cross-industry validator.
To learn more about Daedal Systems, visit daedalsystems.com.
