Priyanca Iyengar Ford

Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Kronos Fusion Energy.

Priyanca Iyengar Ford was seven years old the first time she heard that a machine could hold the fire of the sun. The person who told her was her great-uncle — her grandfather's brother — who had led a nation's atomic program and who used to sit with the children of the family and describe a future powered by fusion. He said it was about fifty years away. She has spent the years since trying to make him right, and early.

Born in India in 1984, she grew up between worlds — boarding school in the United Kingdom, summers that taught her to surf before she was eight, and, from the age of thirteen, a home in the United States. Her mother had come to America to build things, working as an engineer and computing specialist across American industry; some of Priyanca's earliest memories are of sitting beside her at night as she studied, learning the rudiments of SQL and Python before she learned to drive. From her mother's half-Japanese side she absorbed a design philosophy that still governs how she builds: that a thing worth making should be functionally beautiful, pursued toward perfection, and aligned with one's ikigai — one's reason for being. Fusion, she says, is hers.

Her road to it was not a straight line. Recruited into the military in the wake of September 11th, she was — by her own cheerful account — promptly discharged for failing physical tests, "a yoga-doing vegetarian with no capacity to hurt anyone." She spent years in technology and consulting, founded her first company in 2007 and sold it to a major entertainment studio two years later, splitting the proceeds equally with the friends who had built it with her. A second technology company was later acquired. She has poured what she earned into fusion ever since.

She founded Kronos Fusion Energy in 2022. Within a month, two magnet physicists handed her the concept that became the company's two-machine architecture; a pioneer of deuterium–helium-3 fuel science joined the following year; and a veteran who had carried the American fusion program for decades — and who had known her family — stood beside the effort for ten years before formally joining its board.

Priyanca is the mother of a large and unconventional family. Through egg donation and long friendships she helped bring nine children into the world across several families, three of them her own — an arithmetic of generosity she considers the truest expression of the same idea that drives her work: that the point of building anything is to widen the circle of who gets to be free.

One hundred percent of this book's profits are dedicated to The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee.