The pitch sounds like science fiction: a tiny semiconductor chip, barely larger than a pencil eraser, generating electricity perpetually from the quantum foam of empty space itself. No batteries. No solar panels. No power cords snaking across your desk.
That's the promise Houston startup Casimir, Inc. is selling to investors—and on May 12, they found believers willing to put up $12 million.
The oversubscribed seed round, led by Scout Ventures and joined by Lavrock Ventures, Cottonwood Technology Fund, Capital Factory, American DeepTech, and Tim Draper of Draper Associates, blew past an original $8 million target. Not bad for a company commercializing technology that much of the physics establishment considers somewhere between speculative and impossible.
At the center of it all is Dr. Harold "Sonny" White, a former NASA physicist who once led the space agency's warp drive research—work exotic enough to earn both headlines and skepticism in equal measure. Now he's left theoretical propulsion behind for something more grounded, at least in ambition: extracting usable electrical power from what quantum mechanics tells us is an energetic vacuum teeming with virtual particle fluctuations.
The challenge? Making that work outside a laboratory, at scale, and without violating the laws of thermodynamics in the process.
From Warp Bubbles to Watt Hours
White spent years heading NASA's Eagleworks advanced propulsion laboratory at Johnson Space Center, investigating Casimir cavities and warp drive geometries with DARPA funding. Those projects grabbed attention but never delivered hardware you could hold. Casimir, Inc., founded in 2023, represents a shift toward commercial application—a bet that the same quantum field effects could power everyday electronics rather than hypothetical spacecraft.
The company's MicroSparc chip measures just 5mm by 5mm and is engineered to produce 1.5 volts at 25 microamps. That's roughly 40 microwatts, a fraction of what charges your smartphone but potentially enough for tire pressure sensors, medical implants, or remote IoT devices where battery swaps are expensive or impossible.
Casimir claims to have fabricated hundreds of prototype chips at university nanofabrication facilities including Texas A&M's AggieFab and MIT.nano, using Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy to measure outputs ranging from millivolts to volts. White laid out the theoretical underpinnings in a paper published earlier this year in Physical Review Research, titled "Emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum."
Still, independent validation remains elusive, according to industry reports as of mid-May. When The Debrief interviewed experts for its May 12 coverage, most declined to comment on the record. Some experts, who spoke to The Debrief, characterized previous vacuum energy extraction efforts as pseudoscience.
That hesitation isn't surprising. The history of claimed breakthroughs in zero-point energy is littered with ventures that promised revolutions and delivered nothing.
A Founding Team With Pedigree
White isn't working alone. Leonard Dudzinski, a longtime NASA technologist specializing in radioisotope power systems, joined as Senior Vice President of Product Development. Dr. Jerry Vera serves as Chief Engineer. Andre Sylvester handles government relations and business development, while Amy White—Sonny's spouse—acts as Chief of Staff.
The company is co-located with the Limitless Space Institute at Space Center Boulevard, a nonprofit researching interstellar propulsion where White serves as Director of Advanced R&D. That proximity underscores Houston's evolving identity as a hub for space entrepreneurship beyond NASA's traditional footprint.
Casimir also brought aboard Dr. Kam Ghaffarian as both an investor and board member. Ghaffarian's track record includes founding Intuitive Machines, Axiom Space, and X-energy—companies that moved from bold technical visions to actual contracts and hardware. His involvement lends the startup credibility, or at least the appearance of it.
Why Investors Bit
Scout Ventures, which closed an oversubscribed $125 million Fund V in 2026, focuses squarely on dual-use technologies with national security applications. Casimir checks that box. The company markets its chips as "built in America" and positions them for defense and intelligence use cases where replacing batteries in remote sensors can be operationally risky or prohibitively expensive.
Lavrock Ventures shares that national security orientation. Cottonwood Technology Fund backs deep tech ventures willing to tackle hard science problems with long development timelines. Capital Factory, a Texas-based investor and accelerator, showcased Casimir at its Space Walk III event on May 21 at Space Center Houston—a signal of the startup's embedment in the local ecosystem.
Perhaps the dual-use framing helped. Or maybe investors saw White's NASA pedigree and Ghaffarian's Midas touch as enough of a hedge against the technology risk. Either way, the round closed without a disclosed valuation, leaving outside observers to guess what a $12 million seed values a company with a product that might not work.
The Roadmap (And the Reality Check)
Casimir targets commercial availability in 2028. That gives the team roughly two years to move from university fab runs to manufacturing partnerships, from laboratory prototypes to devices that survive real-world conditions, and from milliwatt measurements to reproducible performance an industry standards body would certify.
The initial market, according to the company, represents nearly $10 billion annually in coin-cell battery replacements for low-power devices. Longer term, White outlined aggressive scaling strategies to The Debrief: multilayer chip designs, die stacking to boost power density one hundredfold in the same footprint, and chip aggregation to reach watt-scale output. The ambition extends to electric vehicles, residential power, and data centers. Casimir estimates the total addressable market could exceed $67 billion.
An aspirational cost target of around $100 per watt surfaced in the interview, though that's a forward-looking metric rather than a current price point. The company's website depicts a scaling pipeline from microwatts to kilowatts and megawatts, acknowledging that early products will augment existing batteries rather than replace them outright.
It's a measured message for a technology that, if it performs as claimed, would fundamentally reshape assumptions about portable power.
And if it doesn't? Well, Casimir will join a crowded graveyard of vacuum energy ventures that raised money, published papers, and never shipped a product.
The Question That $12 Million Won't Answer
For now, Casimir has momentum. It has funding, a team with credentials, and investors who specialize in high-risk, high-reward bets on American hardware. According to industry observers, what it doesn't have—yet—is independent proof that its chips work as advertised at commercially viable performance levels.
The 2028 launch window will test whether White's years studying Casimir cavities at NASA translate to something more than theoretical exercises. Regulatory hurdles loom. Customer validation in markets like automotive sensors or medical devices won't come easy, especially for a technology rooted in physics most engineers don't encounter outside graduate school.
White has spent a career chasing ideas at the edge of what's possible. Warp drives remain theoretical curiosities. Quantum vacuum energy extraction might follow the same path—or it might not.
Investors just wagered $12 million that this time, the science clears the lab bench. Whether Casimir's chips end up powering the future or collecting dust alongside other quantum energy claims won't be clear for a while yet. But the clock is ticking, and the scrutiny—from physicists, customers, and investors expecting returns—is only beginning.
