Physicist Mario Menichella has published the Global LENR Landscape Report 2026, an independent survey of 30 organisations working on low-energy nuclear reactions. It covers companies, university groups, national laboratories and funders across three continents. It classifies each on a seven-level scale of commercial readiness, tracks patent filings from 2015, and totals every disclosed funding event in the sector since 2020.
We did not commission the report. We did not contribute to it. The author states plainly that it was not prepared in collaboration with any organisation discussed. That independence is what makes it worth reading, and it is why we are publishing it in full, rather than quoting only the parts that flatter us.
It places ENG8 at level six, demonstration, the highest class reached by any organisation in the survey. Below, we set out what the report says about the field as a whole, then where it places us and what we still have to prove.
The LENR field is now maturing
For most of its history since 1989, this area of research was scattered, contested and easy to dismiss. The report’s central observation is that this has changed. Between 2024 and mid-2026, it describes a move from niche academic curiosity to a sector with recognisable industrial structure: dedicated research consortia, a growing set of companies with disclosed funding rounds, and the first company-reported, third-party-witnessed demonstrations of self-sustaining heat.
That structure is genuinely international. The 30 organisations span North America, Europe and Asia, with North America and Europe together hosting roughly two-thirds of them. The United States fields the largest single national contingent at 11 organisations; Italy and Japan each field three. This is not a one-country curiosity or a single-laboratory claim. It is a distributed field with independent groups pursuing the same phenomenon by different routes.
Governments are funding it now
The clearest signal of that shift is who is now writing the cheques.
The European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme funded two consortia, CleanHME and HERMES, bringing 16 academic and industrial partners into a coordinated research programme. In the United States, ARPA-E committed $10 million to university and national-laboratory groups studying the phenomenon under standard nuclear diagnostics. In Japan, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government put roughly $6.3 million behind Clean Planet, tied to a named district-heating demonstration.
For three decades, support in this field was almost entirely private or philanthropic. The report notes that public and quasi-public funding has now, in cumulative terms, outweighed disclosed private investment. Governments do not attach their names to demonstration sites in areas they consider settled nonsense.
The money is shifting to private hands, but the whole field is still tiny compared with the small modular reactor (SMR) and hot fusion industry
Two numbers frame the investment picture, and they pull in different directions.
The first is direction of travel. The most recent events the report tracks, in 2025 and 2026, show private capital beginning to arrive: an equity round for Clean Planet, funding for ENG8, an announced raise for India’s HYLENR. Early private investors appear to be following the public-funding signal. Patent activity tells the same story, patent-family filings across the leading commercial actors have risen nearly fourfold since 2015, as the sector moves from purely academic disclosure towards defensible commercial positions.
The second number is scale, and it is sobering. Across the entire global field, over six years, the report tracks approximately $43 million in disclosed funding. That is roughly the size of a single Series A round for a mid-stage battery or small-modular-reactor startup. Even the sector’s patent output, on the report’s estimate, is comparable to the annual filings of one mid-sized research department in an adjacent field such as fuel cells.
The report’s own conclusion is that the modest capital deployed, weighed against the impact of a successful commercial validation, produces an asymmetric risk–reward profile. We would put it more plainly: the prize is enormous, the field is under-funded, and the gap between those two facts is the opportunity.
Several credible routes, not one bet
The report is careful to show that LENR is not a monoculture. It groups the field into distinct technical approaches: nickel-hydrogen solid-state systems, catalysed plasma and fusion reactors, electrochemical palladium-deuterium systems, and others. Different teams are reaching for the same result down independent paths.
It also names the leaders by region. In Japan, Clean Planet has the most advanced commercialisation push, partnered with Miura, the country’s largest industrial-heater manufacturer, and historically backed by Mitsubishi, Nissan and Toyota; the report places it at the boundary of pre-commercial and demonstration. In continental Europe, it identifies FutureOn Srl of Italy as the principal privately funded LENR research centre, a CleanHME participant recognised on the European Innovation Radar. In the United States, Brillouin Energy, Leonardo Corporation and Brilliant Light Power all report continued engineering progress. In India, HYLENR is an early-stage entrant with a granted national patent.
We are in good company, and we do not pretend otherwise. What the report records is that, among all of them, ENG8 sits one class higher on readiness than any other.
The bar the whole field has yet to clear
The report does not read as a promotional document, and we would not want it to. On the sector as a whole, and on ENG8 in particular, it is direct about what has not happened.
Reported coefficients of performance remain modest, mostly in the range of 1.5 to 5 for engineering-stage systems, with higher figures coming only from short-duration laboratory experiments that have not been independently reproduced or scaled. No organisation in the survey has publicly documented a commercial deployment supported by broadly available independent performance data. And the single most informative event for the whole sector, the report says, would be an independently audited, sustained, multi-week, megawatt-scale demonstration with third-party calorimetry, a threshold no organisation in the survey, ENG8 included, has yet met. Our own level six classification rests on validation we have reported, following third-party independent validations.
We accept every word of that. We would go further: it is the right bar. A technology that claims to release new energy should be required to prove it under someone else’s instruments, for weeks, at scale, before anyone treats it as an asset class. Anything less is a press release.
Where ENG8 fits, and how we intend to clear it
The distance between where the report places us and where the report says the sector needs to be is measured in deployments, not arguments.
A 100 kW EnergiCell is being installed in a live ceramics line at Primus in Aveiro, Portugal, under a letter of intent signed on 29 June 2026. It delivers hot air into a furnace currently fired by gas, in a working factory, producing tiles to be sold. Portugal’s ceramics association, APICER, representing 1,281 firms, has written in support of the trial.
Beyond Primus, ENG8 has won Prio’s 2026 JumpStart programme, and a second industrial pilot with the Portuguese energy group is under development, with scope to be confirmed. First commercial energy sales are expected in Q4 2026. Self-powering in the 100 kW generator, already demonstrated on a smaller laboratory reactor, is targeted for 2027.
Each of those is a step towards the audited, sustained, scaled demonstration the report is asking for. None of them is that demonstration yet. We are not going to pretend otherwise whilst asking people for money.
The raise
ENG8 is raising €1 million now, at €20 per share, to complete the industrial trials, begin energy sales, and build installation and commissioning capacity. More than 120 angel and private investors have backed the company to date, with founders Haslen Back and Valeria Tyutina contributing approximately €7 million of their own capital and eight years of their time.
Our comparable peers in fusion and small modular fission – Helion, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, TAE and Oklo – carry valuations ranging from roughly €1 billion to as much as €14 billion, whilst remaining pre-revenue and, on their own timelines, three to seven years from commercial deployment. Helion, the most highly valued, raised at about $15.5 billion (≈ €13.6 billion) in a June 2026 round; Oklo, the one publicly listed peer, has swung between roughly $7 billion and $23 billion (≈ €6–20 billion) over the past year alone, and sits near the lower end today. These are large and volatile numbers, attached to companies that, like the rest of the field, have yet to sell power at scale.
We intend to be selling energy this year.
Read the Global LENR Landscape Report 2026 in full and form your own view.
Download full report here.
This article is provided for information only. It is not an offer or solicitation of securities, nor investment, legal or tax advice. Forward-looking statements involve significant risk. Capital is at risk and you may lose your entire investment. Figures are management estimates as of June 2026; peer valuations are indicative, drawn from public reporting, and dollar amounts are converted at approximately $1:€0.88 (July 2026). The Global LENR Landscape Report 2026 is an independent publication; ENG8 did not commission it and is not responsible for its contents.