I hadn't heard of this one before, always interested in fusion news. 3 others I know about are

http://www.generalfusion.com/

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ (Focus fusion)

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.htm...

Tri-Alpha is the biggest private effort...about $200 million invested, 30 Ph.Ds, 150 employees. They recently announced they'd achieved stable plasma, the only major milestone left is scaling up the temperature. They think the plasma will get more stable at higher temperatures. Like focus fusion, they're attempting boron fusion.

Helion is similar to Tri-Alpha but with a pulsed design instead of steady state. They have funding from YCombinator. Instead of boron they're shooting for a hybrid D-D/D-He3 fuel cycle (the D-D reaction produces He3). They say only 6% of the energy released would be as neutron radiation.

Sandia's MagLIF project is interesting. According to their computer simulations they can get 100x to 1000x energy gain by preheating a fuel capsule and crushing it in an upgraded Z-Machine. Things are looking good so far.

UW has the Dynomak project, which is fairly similar to tokamak but a lot smaller and cheaper. They need $10 million to test the concept.

Just saw this: "New advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor". Plus the usual "10 years away!"...

http://www.technologyreview.com/article/541996/a-workable-fu...