LINEA Innovations Named to Falling Walls Venture’s “TOP 100 Science Startups to watch in 2026”

Recognized as a Japanese fusion startup in an international science startup competition inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall

TOKYO — LINEA Innovations, Inc. (Representative Director & CEO: Yuta Nojiri; hereinafter “LINEA”), a Japanese fusion energy startup developing an FRC-mirror hybrid reactor, today announced that it has been named to the “TOP 100 Science Startups to Watch in 2026” by Falling Walls Venture, the international science start-up competition run by the Falling Walls Foundation, a non-profit organization headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

The Selection Process

Falling Walls Venture is a nomination-based international competition open only to startups nominated by universities, research institutions, accelerators, and other endorsing organizations. LINEA was nominated by RESPOND, an accelerator program run by the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, and was selected for the TOP 100 from among science and technology startups worldwide.

LINEA now advances to the selection of the 25 finalists, to be announced in August 2026. Finalists will be invited to the Falling Walls Science Summit, held in Berlin from November 6 to 9, 2026, where they will pitch before an international jury and compete for the “Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year” award in the Science Start-ups category.

The Falling Walls Foundation and Falling Walls Venture

The Falling Walls Foundation is a non-profit established in Berlin in 2009 — the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — with the mission of asking “Which are the next walls to fall?” in science and society. Each year, around November 9, the anniversary of the fall of the Wall, it hosts the Falling Walls Science Summit, one of Europe’s leading interdisciplinary science events, bringing together more than 2,000 leaders in science, politics, business, and media from over 100 countries.

Falling Walls Venture, one of its programs, is an international competition for science startups launched in 2013. Open to startups grounded in scientific research, it has received more than 1,800 nominations to date across all fields, including biotech, AI, cleantech, new materials, and engineering. More than 275 finalist companies have taken its stage, raising a cumulative total of over €4.1 billion in funding with a reported survival rate of 90%, establishing the competition as a proven gateway for turning science into business. In the fusion field, Proxima Fusion (Munich, Germany), a spin-out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, won the Sustainability cluster in 2023.

What This Recognition Means

The Falling Walls Venture jury is chaired by Stefan von Holtzbrinck, CEO of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, and comprises university researchers, international venture capital firms, and heads of innovation at major corporations. The 2025 jury included experts from the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Chevron Technology Ventures, the XPRIZE Foundation, Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND), and the University of Milano-Bicocca. We believe that being recognized through this selection process — which examines both scientific rigor and business viability — signifies that LINEA’s technological direction has been acknowledged by the international scientific and industrial community.

Germany is also a cleantech pioneer that led the way in the transition to renewable energy, and is home to a concentration of fusion startups, including Proxima Fusion. We regard the selection of our approach — rooted in Japanese university research — as one of the “TOP 100 startups to watch” in an international competition based in a country with such high awareness of the energy transition as a sign of the expectations placed on our technology choices: the FRC-mirror hybrid approach and p-¹¹B fusion.

About Our Technology

LINEA is a fusion startup built on research from Nihon University and the University of Tsukuba. It employs the “FRC-mirror hybrid approach,” which combines FRC plasma formation technology with mirror magnetic fields, and aims to achieve p-¹¹B fusion using hydrogen (protium) and boron-11 as fuel.

Because the products of the p-11B reaction are charged particles (alpha particles), it generates almost no neutrons and uses no tritium, a radioactive material. This has the potential to reshape the key challenges facing the practical use of fusion power, such as activation of reactor materials, regulatory compliance, and fuel procurement. In addition, the FRC-mirror hybrid approach features a simpler and more compact device structure than other designs, enabling faster development cycles.

About LINEA Innovations, Inc.

Company name: LINEA Innovations, Inc.
Address: VORT Kanda Ogawamachi II #501, 1-10-2 Kanda Ogawamachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Representative: Yuta Nojiri, Representative Director & CEO
Established: September 29, 2023
Business: Research and development of commercial fusion reactors based on the FRC-mirror hybrid approach
URL: https://linea-innovations.com/
Under its mission “Fusion Energy to the Future Generations,” LINEA has worked since its founding in 2023 to realize fusion power generation built on scientific knowledge originating from university research.

Contact

Public Relations, LINEA Innovations, Inc.
E-mail: pr@linea-innovations.com