Molten Salt Solutions raises $7M to supply the lithium fusion depends on: meet John Elling
A Santa Fe company that doesn't build reactors, but makes one of the ingredients they need. A look at a nuclear deep tech funding round, and at a rare go-to-market: sold out before the factory even exists.
Molten Salt Solutions (MSS) has closed an oversubscribed $7 million seed round to scale up production of enriched lithium. The fusion industry cannot run without this material, and the United States does not currently produce it at commercial scale. The round was led by Dolby Family Ventures, with Vanedge Capital Partners, Alumni Ventures, Gaingels, True Ventures and Future Ventures participating.
The Santa Fe company is not building a reactor. It makes one of the ingredients reactors need. We spoke with founder and CEO John Elling about how a company started for one nuclear market ended up at the center of another. We also asked why his first investor found him through a one-paragraph government abstract, and what go-to-market looks like when you are sold out before your factory exists.
The founder: a scientist who chose to leave the lab
John Elling has been starting companies in analytical chemistry and biotech for more than 25 years. He holds a PhD in analytical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin and an MBA from the University of New Mexico. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, he worked both as a technical staff member and as a visiting entrepreneur.
He has repeatedly turned national lab research into companies, including Acoustic Cytometry Systems, which licensed Los Alamos technology and was later acquired. His reason for becoming an entrepreneur runs through the whole conversation. "Back when I was a scientist, there was all this wonderful science, and nobody ever used it," he says. "All the best discovery in the world doesn't mean anything."
He makes the point with an example. "A scientist could discover a way of curing a disease. It doesn't do the world any good until you can buy the pill." Today, he says with a smile, "I'm not the smart guy anymore. I hire smart people."
2018: a company named after a reactor, not a fuel
MSS did not start with fusion. In 2018, Elling and his co-founders were studying the materials needed by small modular reactors. This new generation of fission plants is designed to be smaller, cheaper to build and fail-safe.
"There's a push to make them smaller so that they can be built in industrial facilities similar to shipyards," Elling explains. "You build them in one place, you can sort of mass-produce them, and then you move the reactors to where they're needed." The safety logic is just as simple: "If anything goes wrong, they just turn themselves off."
One family of these designs uses molten salts, hence the company name. The team quickly realized that the hardest problem was not the salts themselves. It was getting the right isotopes into them, at volumes no one had ever produced commercially. "There is no technology in the world that's been commercialized to do hundreds of tons of small stable isotope separation," he says.
Lithium-6, lithium-7, and the market that flipped
Natural lithium comes in two stable isotopes: about 7.5% lithium-6 and 92.5% lithium-7. They behave almost identically in chemistry, but very differently inside a reactor.
For molten salt fission reactors, lithium-6 is the problem. It captures neutrons and turns into tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that operators work hard to avoid. So these reactors need nearly pure lithium-7. "We were happily working on isotopes for molten salt reactors," Elling recalls.
Then fusion took off, after Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's ignition breakthrough in late 2022. Most fusion designs burn two forms of hydrogen: deuterium, easily extracted from seawater, and tritium, which barely exists in nature. Tritium has to be bred inside the reactor, from lithium-6. "Now they want to deliberately make tritium, because it's half of their fuel," Elling says.
The isotope one market wanted removed became the ingredient another market cannot live without. "For us, it doesn't matter," he says. "There's two isotopes of lithium, so all we're doing is separating them."
The need is urgent on both sides. Some molten salt reactor developers, such as Copenhagen Atomics in Denmark, have started enriching lithium in-house because they could not buy it. On the fusion side, Elling is direct: "If you don't get lithium-6 pretty soon, you don't have any tritium, and all of the fusion development stops."
He is also candid about the timing. "I'd like to say that we were geniuses in starting to enrich lithium back in 2018, but really we were looking at a different market," he says. "We were at the right place at the right time."
The investor who found them, and the email he almost deleted
Most founders spend months chasing investors. In MSS's case, the investor came looking.
A fusion company told one of its investors, Future Ventures, that without lithium-6 it would be "dead in the water." Maryanna Saenko, co-founder of Future Ventures, started searching for lithium isotope companies. She found a single paragraph MSS had published on a government website, a standard requirement for a grant it had received. It described lithium isotope enrichment using new technology from Los Alamos.
She wrote to the company's generic contact address. Elling deleted the email as spam. She wrote again, and he deleted it again. Her third email's subject line said Commonwealth Fusion Systems needed lithium-6 and that MSS seemed to be working on it. "I read the subject and I go, well, that's too specific to be junk," he laughs.
That email turned into MSS's first funding round. "I've been an entrepreneur now for almost 30 years. It's the first time in my life I've ever had an investor seek me out," he says. The latest round followed the same logic. Investors who already back fusion know that its supply chain of specialty materials has to be built from scratch, and fast.
The technology: "a really efficient way of making salad dressing"
Lithium is actually one of the easier elements to enrich, Elling explains. The atom is so light that the one-neutron difference between lithium-6 and lithium-7 is large in relative terms. It is far larger than the gap between the uranium isotopes used in nuclear fuel.
The method MSS uses is well known to chemists, and Elling explains it with a kitchen analogy. "You take oil and you take vinegar, you put it in a jar and you shake it up. Then you put it on the counter, and over time you have oil and water again." Lithium-6 has a very slight preference for the oily layer. "None of them want to be in oil. Lithium-6 is a little less unhappy to be in oil," he jokes.
The catch is repetition. Each shake moves the ratio only a tiny bit, so going from 7.5% lithium-6 to 90% takes about a thousand steps. "Good news is it's easy, everybody knows it works. Bad news is it's very expensive to do it a thousand times," he says. Large-scale enrichment has been done before, by the US government decades ago. "If you're the government, you have all the money. But you can't do that if you're making a commercial product."
This is where MSS's edge comes from. Los Alamos had developed a technology that makes very difficult liquid-liquid extractions far more efficient, for a different application. One of the scientists who built it there left to join MSS, and the team applied it to lithium. The company says its process is roughly 100 times more efficient than legacy enrichment methods.
"The value of our company is an easy separation chemistry that we can do much, much more efficiently than anybody else can," Elling says. Or, as he puts it: "We have a really, really efficient way of making salad dressing."
From enriched salt to a finished product
MSS's process is efficient enough to produce highly enriched lithium-7 and highly enriched lithium-6 at the same time. Lithium-7 goes to the fission market, lithium-6 to fusion.
But customers do not want to buy saltwater. "Fusion companies don't want to be chemistry companies," Elling says. So MSS is also building the downstream steps, turning its enriched salts into the forms reactors actually use, such as lithium metal or lithium fluoride. Purity and yield are the priority: "By the time we're done enriching the isotopes, it's really expensive lithium, so we don't want to lose any of it."
Raw lithium is not the bottleneck. MSS buys it on the open market, where the battery industry has built enormous supply. Purity is another story. Battery makers track a handful of impurities, while nuclear customers care about nearly all of them.
MSS is therefore surveying lithium from different producers, including through a project with the US government, to find the cleanest sources. For a producer that happens to meet the spec, it means moving from a commodity price to a premium one. "It's good for everybody to get out of the commodity business and into the premium business," Elling says.
The company is also helping define what "fusion-grade" lithium should mean. It received a DOE INFUSE award to develop fusion-grade lithium material specifications, building on an initiative launched by the Clean Air Task Force in 2022 to address emerging fusion supply chain requirements.
Go-to-market: sold out before the factory exists
Most startups struggle to find customers. MSS has the opposite problem. "I have signed two, and soon to be three, offtake agreements with fusion companies," Elling says. "Three of the sixty companies already exceeds my planned production. I haven't even built my production facility yet, and I'm already sold out."
The two announced agreements are with Type One Energy, a US company developing stellarator power plants, and Gauss Fusion, a German company developing tokamak power plants. According to the March 2026 announcement, initial kilogram-scale deliveries for testing could begin as early as 2027.
Elling's view of short-term demand explains the urgency. Based on market research by MSS and others, he says fusion developers will need about 500 tons of enriched lithium-6 over the next three to five years. "There is currently zero available."
The market structure is unusual too. By his count, there are around 60 fusion companies and seven publicly funded government programs worldwide. "I know the names of every single person in the world that could potentially buy my product. I could send them Christmas cards if I wanted to," he says. "My customers are really trying to find me."
The buying criteria are not those of a commodity market either. "The battery industry wants to produce low-cost batteries. The nuclear industry doesn't want to blow up," Elling says. Nuclear operators do not shop around for fuel. They lock in a supplier they trust and stay with it.
"The quality, the trustworthiness and the consistency are of supreme value when you're talking about the nuclear industry," he says. For MSS, that means selling on quality and reliability as much as on price, and building relationships early, before reactor designs are frozen.
Picks and shovels for the fusion gold rush
Elling does not claim to know which fusion design will win, and he does not need to. "When there's a gold rush, all the miners go out, and some of them find gold and most of them don't. The people that really get rich are the ones making the picks and shovels," he says. "I don't care which fusion technology works. If it needs tritium, it needs lithium."
He expects a natural selection. Today's roughly 60 approaches will narrow as physics, funding and markets sort them out, much as fission converged on a few dominant reactor designs. "It's not always the best science that wins. It's the best science done in the best business," he says. He points to Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which chose a lower-risk tokamak design and became one of the best-funded fusion companies in the world.
The long-term market, in his words, is "jaw-dropping." If fusion supplies even a small share of the world's future power, its supply chain has to go from almost nothing to industrial scale within a few decades.
MSS is not alone in the race, and Elling is candid about it. "There's at least a dozen other efforts to enrich lithium," he says. "I'm lucky, I got started in 2018, so I'm ahead." Beyond lithium, the company plans to apply the same platform to other enriched stable isotopes.
What's next: a first production facility, and a look at Europe
The seed round funds the move from laboratory-validated technology to pilot-scale production, to fulfill customer agreements. It also funds the growth of the technical and operations teams. The next step is bigger: a first commercial production facility, which Elling puts at around $30 million.
Demand is already pushing him further. "The other 57 companies need to get lithium," he says. "So I need to start planning something that's ten times larger."
Government support will shape where that facility gets built. In Elling's view, European governments are currently investing more public money in fusion than the US, which makes Europe a serious option. "If there are government incentives to cover part of that, then I only have to raise the rest," he says.
He also has a more personal criterion. "We want to aim for producing lithium near a good vineyard," he says, naming France, Spain and Italy. Writing from Montpellier, we can only encourage that.
GTM lessons for deep tech founders
- Be findable, even in one paragraph. MSS's first round came from a grant abstract an investor found online. In a niche market, the right person searching the right words is worth more than broad awareness.
- Sell to the whole race, not one runner. A supply chain company does not have to pick the winning technology. Selling to every contender spreads the risk that any single design fails.
- With 60 named accounts, GTM is relationships. Know every buyer, sign offtake agreements early, and earn trust before designs are frozen.
- In safety-critical markets, trust is part of the product. Quality and consistency can matter as much as price, and supplier relationships last once established.
- Where you build is a funding decision. Public incentives can cut the capital you need to raise, so plant location shapes the financing, not just the operations.
Molten Salt Solutions at a glance
- Headquarters: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
- Founded in 2018 by Dr. John Elling (founder and CEO, PhD in analytical chemistry)
- What it does: separates natural lithium into lithium-6 (for fusion) and lithium-7 (for advanced fission)
- Latest round: $7M seed, oversubscribed, announced August 31, 2026
- Lead investor: Dolby Family Ventures; other investors: Vanedge Capital Partners, Alumni Ventures, Gaingels, True Ventures, Future Ventures
- Total venture funding: $10M ($3M pre-seed + $7M seed)
- Non-dilutive funding: more than $5M in grants, including New Mexico's Advanced Energy Award
- Announced customers: Type One Energy (US) and Gauss Fusion (Germany)
- Website: moltensaltsolutions.com
Article published by Uclic, growth marketing and AI agency. Interview by Alexis Christine-Amara, September 2026.