Priyanca Iyengar Ford

Priyanca Ford's road to fusion didn't begin in a plasma-physics lab. It began on the electrical grid. Leading smart-grid and advanced-metering analytics for Edison International, she spent her days modeling how energy moves across a vast, aging system — and where it fails. The barriers between fusion and the real world, she concluded, were no longer only questions of physics but of engineering execution, systems integration, and economics. That insight became Kronos Fusion Energy.

As founder and executive board member she leads a company building compact, high-field, low-neutron fusion generators with direct energy conversion — organized around two product lines, MetroVolt for commercial urban-grid power and Aegis for defense — on a simulation-first, de-risked commercialization path.

A three-time founder with two exits, she built and sold Short Girl Films and later founded 3DBuildBot, a global additive-manufacturing marketplace acquired in 2017. Around those ventures she spent a decade as a global management consultant at Deloitte and advised the Office of the CEO at companies including Disney and SLB. She studied economics and applied mathematics at UCLA and completed executive education at Harvard and Stanford. She publishes as P. I. Ford.

“Fusion's last mile isn't a physics miracle — it's an engineering and commercialization problem. That's the one I know how to solve.”