Bengaluru's Pranos Fusion Completes PRAGYA, India's First Privately Built Tokamak

What's New

Pranos Fusion, a Bengaluru deep-tech startup working on nuclear fusion hardware, says it has completed construction of PRAGYA, a compact tokamak it describes as the first ever conceived, funded and built entirely by a private company in India rather than a national laboratory. The company reported the milestone this month, with commissioning now underway toward a "first plasma" target the company is aiming to hit later in 2026 — a distinct and harder milestone than completing the machine itself, which PRAGYA has not yet reached.

This is a follow-up to, not a repeat of, Pranos Fusion's earlier news: the company closed a $6.8 million (roughly ₹63 crore) funding round in March 2026, co-led by pi Ventures and Ankur Capital with participation from Industrial47 and angel investors including Groww co-founder Lalit Keshre. That round funded the work; this month's milestone is the first major physical output of it — an actual machine, built and standing, rather than a funded plan to build one.

A Small Machine With a Big Claim

PRAGYA is deliberately compact: a low-aspect-ratio tokamak with a major radius of roughly 0.40 metres and a minor radius greater than 0.18 metres, giving it an aspect ratio around 2.2. Its toroidal magnetic field is targeted at about 0.1 Tesla, with a target plasma current of 20,000 to 25,000 amperes. By the company's own description, it is the smallest tokamak built in India to date.

Tokamaks confine superheated plasma in a magnetic field shaped like a torus — the fundamental architecture behind most of the world's leading fusion-energy efforts, including the international ITER project under construction in France. Low-aspect-ratio designs like PRAGYA's, sometimes called spherical or compact tokamaks, have drawn increasing private-sector interest globally because they can, in principle, reach higher plasma performance in a smaller, cheaper machine than the larger conventional tokamaks that dominated fusion research through the twentieth century — the same design logic behind well-funded Western fusion startups pursuing compact reactors.

Founders and Institutional Ties

Pranos Fusion was founded in May 2024 by Shaurya Kaushal, who holds a PhD in computational physics from JNCASR and an engineering degree from BITS Pilani, and previously worked with the UK Atomic Energy Authority and CSIR-CEERI, and Roshan George, a computer scientist who leads the company's software and control-algorithm work. The company is co-incubated at the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) and the Innovation and Development Centre at JNCASR, with working ties to IISc and ITER-India — giving a two-year-old startup access to plasma-physics expertise and testing infrastructure that would otherwise take years and far more capital to build independently.

Beyond the reactor itself, Pranos Fusion's broader technology stack includes JENGA, plasma-control and digital-twin software for modelling and managing reactor behaviour, and MAGGA, the company's program for high-temperature superconducting magnets — the kind of magnet technology that has become one of the central enabling technologies behind the recent wave of compact fusion designs worldwide, since higher-field magnets allow smaller machines to reach the plasma pressures fusion requires.

Why "First Plasma," Not PRAGYA Itself, Is the Real Test

Completing construction of a tokamak is a serious engineering achievement, but it is not evidence that the machine works as designed. First plasma — the point at which a tokamak first successfully creates and briefly confines a plasma inside its magnetic field — is the milestone that actually validates the underlying physics and engineering choices: whether the magnetic geometry behaves as modelled, whether the control systems can manage the plasma in real time, and whether the machine's diagnostics can even see what is happening inside it clearly enough to learn from.

Globally, compact fusion startups have found this to be where ambitious timelines most often slip, as plasma behaviour routinely surfaces problems that finite-element modelling did not predict. Pranos Fusion reaching PRAGYA's construction milestone roughly a year and a half after its founding, and only months after its March 2026 funding round, is fast by fusion-industry standards; whether it can hit first plasma by the end of 2026, as targeted, will be the more meaningful signal of whether India's first private tokamak effort is on a credible path toward eventually contributing to the country's fusion research base — or whether, like many fusion timelines before it, the harder half of the work is still ahead.

Sources

• https://officechai.com/startups/indian-startup-pranos-fusion-says-it-has-made-indias-first-private-tokamak/
• https://yourstory.com/2026/08/pranos-fusion-power-machinery
• https://theprint.in/ground-reports/this-bengaluru-startups-leading-indias-nuclear-fusion-research-to-light-up-a-billion-homes/2541319/
• https://www.piventures.in/blog-article/pranos-forging-indias-path-to-commercial-nuclear-fusion
• https://www.indiandefensenews.in/2026/08/pranos-fusion-advances-on-indias-first.html