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The biggest lesson that the new CFO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems took from his former gig as CFO of Moderna is that "long-term capital access is everything," Lorence Kim tells Axios Pro. 

Why it matters: The financial framing could help get CFS to commercialization, a tall order given fusion's massive capital costs and long timelines. 

Driving the news: Axios Pro spoke with Kim, who CFS on Thursday announced as CFO alongside another $1 billion raise.

Zoom in: Kim, who was also previously Goldman Sachs' co-head of biotech investment banking, says there are a lot of parallels between his biotech experience and the fusion sector: pre-revenue companies, a budding industry, capital intensity over long periods, and game-changing impact.

Kim helped Moderna grow from its initial work proving mRNA's efficacy in 2014 to shipping the first batch of its COVID-19 vaccine for testing in 2020. 

Kim asked himself "what could match" seeing the global impact of the COVID-19 vaccine when he was considering his career post-Moderna.

Turns out trying to commercialize the world's first fusion reactors is an intriguing prospect. 

Editor's note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

"In the Moderna journey, it was always about the sequence of things that had to be true in order for mRNA to become a new class of medicine.

It wasn't just the amount of capital, it was the sequential fundraising over time.

In order to do that, to maintain that long-term capital access, you had to be thoughtful about value creation from one step to the next, and also who your investors are going to be and how you message that at every step of the way."

On whether there is a COVID-19 moment equivalent for fusion:

"I hope it's not as existential as COVID felt in the moment, but we're in a moment where people are broadly waking up to this core question of how to meet demand for power now and over the near-term future."

"Many of them don't need the validation of being in a release. They're investing for their own strategic purposes, and in some cases, they'd say we'd actually rather not be named.

We're going to continue to accumulate a lot of investors, and we're at a threshold where naming every single one is not really necessary."

"This isn't what you typically call a crossover round that comes with pretty explicit conversations with investors that suggest that you're deep into IPO prep, and there's a pretty defined timeline to go public.

What does that mean for degrees of freedom on an IPO? I think that'll be defined in the moment. This billion dollars brings us plenty of capital to go deliver many things, and if an IPO makes sense, we'll make that decision at the time."

"Being public carries many distractions and costs. So for a company like ours that can access the capital privately, currently it's just preferential.

When companies that are early, that are really reliant still on scientific advancement, tap into the public markets because the money is there, the issue is, it's very hard to adequately disclose scientific risk.

Science is hard. It goes sideways. It can be unpredictable. And if it happens when you're a public company, you can lose credibility, and momentum can go the wrong way very quickly.

In the biotech space, that led to phenomena like biotech nuclear winters. In the early 2000s, we had one for many years where there was just no capital flowing to the space because a bubble had burst."

CFS' new CFO on the Moderna financing model for fusion

A biotech financial framing could get CFS to commercialization.

Smiling man with dark hair wearing a pale lavender dress shirt, arms crossed, posing against a light gray background with a blue-gray frame.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems chief financial officer Lorence Kim. Photo: Courtesy of Commonwealth Fusion Systems

The biggest lesson that the new CFO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems took from his former gig as CFO of Moderna is that &quot;long-term capital access is everything,&quot; Lorence Kim tells Axios Pro. Why it matters: The financial framing could help get CFS to commercialization, a tall order given fusion&#x27;s massive capital costs and long timelines.

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CFS' new CFO on the Moderna financing model for fusion

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