FOUNDERS
From Twilio to fusion, Jeff Lawson bets on a harder problem
Jeff Lawson, who scaled Twilio into a public company with more than $4 billion in revenue and 300,000 customers, is now co-founder and chief executive of Inertia, a fusion energy venture. In February 2026 Inertia announced a $450 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from GV, funding laser systems and mass manufacture of fusion fuel targets.
The move reads as a deliberate choice rather than a reaction to an available opportunity: in July 2026 Inertia opened a 50,000-square-foot headquarters in Livermore, California, and recruited leaders from Apple, Corning and Waymo for manufacturing and supply chain. Lawson, previously in early product leadership at Amazon Web Services and founding CTO of StubHub, is betting on an endpoint defined by grid-scale power, not by software habits.
Source: TechCrunch Startups · September 18, 2026