Zap Energy is building a seriously cheap, compact, scalable fusion energy technology with potentially the shortest path to commercially viable fusion and orders of magnitude less capital than traditional approaches.
This breakthrough technology confines and compresses plasma without costly and complex magnetic coils.
Benj Conway is an entrepreneur, investor and former diplomat. He studied medicine at Gonville and Caius College Cambridge (1st Class) and University College, Oxford. He spent his early career at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office working across Asia and the Middle East, with much of that decade posted overseas. Since leaving government, Benj has founded and invested in companies in pre-emerging markets and technologies, including InFrontier, a leading frontier-market private equity firm. Benj co-founded Zap Energy with Uri Shumlak and Brian Nelson.
Brian A. Nelson received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987, after which he joined the UW, where he retired as a Research Professor Emeritus in 2019. He has worked on several fusion energy concepts, including tandem & axisymmetric mirrors, theta-pinches, linear stellarators & heliacs, field-reversed configurations, spherical torii, and sheared-flow stabilized Z-pinches. He was project manager in the design, ground-up construction, and successful operation of ten different experiments at the UW. Brian co-founded Zap Energy with Benj Conway and Uri Shumlak.
Uri Shumlak received his PhD in Nuclear Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, and worked at the Air Force Phillips Laboratory at Kirtland AFB, before joining the UW in 1994. He is a world-renowned theoretical, computational, and experimental plasma physicist. Uri is the lead developer of the sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch concept, and Principal Investigator of the UW ZaP, ZaP-HD, and FuZE flow Z-pinch research projects, as well as the UW Computational Plasma Dynamics Laboratory group. He has won numerous awards for his teaching, research, and mentoring, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Uri co-founded Zap Energy with Benj Conway and Brian Nelson.
Aaron Schildkrout is an entrepreneur, investor and advisor. He is a founding investor at Addition, the venture fund created in 2020 by Lee Fixel with 2.7b aum. He has served on the boards of Better, Noom, Rhino, Tala, Keep Truckin, JUMP and others. He is a senior advisor to The New York Times, Blink Health, Juul Labs and a number of other high-growth companies. He was previously an executive at Uber where he ran Growth, Global Marketing, Data, and the Driver side of the business. Prior to that he founded and was CEO of HowAboutWe (acquired by IAC). Aaron is a Harvard grad and currently serves on the Board at Codman Academy Charter Public School, where he was a teacher in the early part of his career.
Clay is a founding partner at Lowercarbon Capital where he works closely with unreasonably ambitious founders to slash CO2, suck up carbon from the atmosphere, and buy time for the people and places already suffering from too much heat. In parallel with co-leading the Lowercarbon strategy, Clay is also a partner at Lowercase Capital, one of the industry’s highest-performing early-stage venture funds. Previously, Clay worked in the West Wing serving as an aide to the Senior Advisor and the Deputy Chief of Staff in the Obama Administration. His work spanned operations and security to media and political strategy, culminating in working on the team that produced the 2014 State of the Union Address. He went on to help rebuild the Office of Digital Strategy, a team tasked by President Obama to use the internet to connect people with purpose. Part of his mandate was to reinvigorate how the White House built online support for its conservation, energy, and other planet-healing initiatives.
Udayan Das Roy is a Portfolio Manager at Soros Fund Management, where he has covered the energy sector since 2012. He was previously a board member at Amply Power, and a board observer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. He graduated from Colgate University where he currently serves as a trustee.