A new wave of Indian deep-tech startups is tacking problems far beyond grocery delivery and household help.
The latest example comes from Bengaluru, where a young company called Pranos Fusion says it has built PRAGYA, a compact machine it describes as India’s first privately developed tokamak — the core piece of hardware that fusion companies around the world are racing to perfect on the road to clean, virtually limitless energy.
What exactly is a tokamak?
For anyone who hasn’t spent time around plasma physicists, a tokamak is essentially a doughnut-shaped chamber designed to recreate, in miniature, the kind of reaction that powers the sun. Inside the chamber, light atoms — usually forms of hydrogen — are heated to millions of degrees until they become plasma, a superheated, electrically charged gas. Since nothing solid can touch plasma at those temperatures without vaporising instantly, powerful magnets wrapped around the outside of the chamber are used to hold the plasma in place, forcing it to spiral inside the ring without ever touching the walls. When the atoms inside are confined and squeezed tightly enough, some of them fuse together, releasing large amounts of energy in the process — the same basic reaction that lights up stars.
Getting that reaction to happen in a controlled, repeatable way on Earth has occupied physicists for over 70 years, and doing it cheaply enough to put electricity on a grid is the multi-billion-dollar problem that companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems abroad, and now Pranos Fusion at home, are trying to solve.
The company, and the two founders behind it
Pranos Fusion was founded in May 2024 by Shaurya Kaushal and Roshan George, and is based out of Bengaluru. Kaushal, who serves as CEO, holds a PhD in computational physics from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) and an engineering degree from BITS Pilani, and has previously worked with the UK Atomic Energy Authority and CSIR-CEERI. He leads the company’s physics and hardware engineering work. Roshan George, the co-founder and COO, comes from a computer science background and had spent years building digital and intelligence platforms for the energy industry before turning to fusion; at Pranos, he leads the software and control-algorithms side of the business.
The pair have described their partnership as a study in contrasts — one an introspective yoga practitioner, the other a self-described comic-book fan who enjoys a good argument — but say they are aligned on a single, audacious goal: building the infrastructure to bring fusion power to India’s grid, rather than waiting for the technology to arrive from elsewhere.
Pranos is co-incubated at JNCASR and the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) in Gandhinagar, and works closely with the Indian Institute of Science. It has also been engaging with ITER, the large international fusion collaboration based in France.
Funding and traction so far
Pranos started small. It first raised roughly ₹3.5 crore in a pre-seed round from Industrial47, along with a ₹20 lakh grant from the Startup India Seed Fund. The big jump came in March 2026, when the startup closed a $6.8 million (about ₹63 crore) round co-led by pi Ventures and Ankur Capital, with Industrial47 returning alongside a clutch of well-known angels — Groww co-founder Lalit Keshre, the founders of Razorpay, and Bhukhanwala Industries. That takes the company’s total funding to around $7.22 million, and it currently runs a lean team of about eight people.
The startup is building what it calls an integrated fusion technology stack rather than chasing a single reactor. That stack has three parts: JENGA, a design and plasma-control software platform; PRAGYA, its physical tokamak; and MAGGA, a programme to build high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets in-house, the same kind of magnet technology that has helped well-funded Western rivals like Commonwealth Fusion Systems shrink their reactor designs.
What makes PRAGYA notable
PRAGYA is a compact, low-aspect-ratio tokamak — think of it as more “apple-shaped” than the traditional doughnut — with a major radius of just 0.40 metres, a toroidal field of 0.1 Tesla, and a target plasma current of 20–25 kiloamperes. For comparison, ITER’s own tokamak has a radius of 6.2 metres, so PRAGYA is very much a scaled-down testbed rather than a power-generating reactor. Its job isn’t to produce net energy; it’s to let Pranos’s engineers run real plasma experiments, test magnet configurations, and validate JENGA’s control software on actual hardware rather than only in simulation. The company says it eventually wants to offer PRAGYA as a low-cost testing platform for other fusion startups, particularly in Europe, that don’t want to build their own experimental infrastructure.
India already operates three government-run tokamaks — ADITYA-1, ADITYA-U, and SST-1 — all housed at the Institute for Plasma Research, with SST-1 notably using superconducting magnets. PRAGYA’s significance, according to Pranos, is that it is the first such machine to be conceived, funded, and built entirely by a private company in the country, rather than a national lab.
Commissioning of PRAGYA is underway, with the company targeting its “first plasma” milestone — the point at which the machine actually produces confined plasma — sometime in 2026. Beyond that, Pranos has laid out plans for a larger successor reactor, internally referred to as PraniQ, that would use its in-house HTS magnets and aim, much further down the line, for net energy gain. The founders have talked about an eventual ambition of powering close to a billion homes through modular fusion reactors — a distant target, by their own admission, but one they argue India should be chasing as a builder rather than a follower.