A startup founded by a former NASA advanced propulsion researcher has emerged from stealth mode with an ambitious claim: it has developed a semiconductor chip that generates continuous electrical power by harvesting energy directly from the quantum vacuum. Casimir Inc. announced that it raised $12 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round - exceeding its $8 million target - to bring the device, called MicroSparc, to market by 2028.
Casimir press release
The press release describes MicroSparc as the world’s first quantum energy chip. Measuring just 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters, the device is said to produce 1.5 volts at 25 microamps, delivering roughly 40 microwatts of continuous power. That output is comparable to a small rechargeable battery but requires no recharging, replacement, or external power source. Casimir positions the chip for ultra-low-power applications such as tire-pressure monitoring systems, embedded sensors, medical implants, and wearables. The company plans to scale the technology later for consumer electronics, electric vehicles, home systems, and larger infrastructure.
The technology rests on engineered Casimir cavity structures fabricated into semiconductor hardware. These microscopic features are designed to interact with the quantum vacuum - the seething sea of virtual particles and fluctuating electromagnetic fields that exists even in empty space according to quantum field theory. Dr. Harold “Sonny” White, Casimir’s founder and CEO and a longtime NASA researcher known for work on advanced propulsion concepts, stated that the chip creates persistent electrical power by customizing these cavities. “Millions of devices will operate for years without a battery ever needing to be replaced or recharged,” he said. The company was incubated at the Limitless Space Institute and has received support from DARPA-funded nanofabrication research and university partnerships.
Sonny White discussed these things with Joe Rogan last year. See my review titled “Joe Rogan interviews visionary space engineer Sonny White.”
More detailed explanations
A more detailed article published by The Debrief provides more technical insight into how the MicroSparc is claimed to function. The device uses arrays of static Casimir cavities featuring micropillars fixed to a substrate. In conventional Casimir setups, two parallel conductive plates are pulled together by vacuum fluctuations, but momentum conservation prevents net energy extraction. Casimir’s design fixes the cavity walls and pillars in place, creating “a kind of quantum ratchet.” Vacuum fluctuations outside the cavity stimulate electrons in the wall atoms. These electrons occasionally quantum tunnel - one-way electron movement across a barrier too narrow for classical physics - toward the central pillars. Inside the cavity, longer-wavelength fluctuations are excluded, reducing the probability of electrons tunneling back. The result, according to the company, is a steady one-way flow of electrons that generates measurable direct current.
Prototypes have been fabricated. Hundreds of chips were tested in radio-frequency-shielded, low-noise enclosures using precision electrometers and atomic force microscopy. Casimir reports observing outputs ranging from millivolts to volts at picoamp levels, consistently above the noise floor. White emphasized that the approach draws directly from his earlier DARPA-supported research into custom Casimir cavities, which originated in studies of negative vacuum energy for potential warp-drive metrics.
See also White’s interview with Tim Ventura, released a few months ago after White’s interview with Joe Rogan. A few weeks ago White gave a talk at Deep Tech Week in New York City. A video of the talk has been shared on X.
Technical paper
The company’s claims are grounded in a peer-reviewed theoretical paper by White and collaborators, titled “Emergent Quantization from a Dynamic Vacuum,” published in Physical Review Research earlier this year. The work presents an acoustic-like model of the quantum vacuum. The authors treat the vacuum as a compressible, dispersive medium with density and elasticity properties, similar to how sound waves propagate through air. By adding quadratic temporal dispersion - a mathematical term describing how wave speed depends on frequency in time - they derive a fully analytic mapping to the exact energy levels and wave functions of the hydrogen atom.
In White’s model, the discrete energy levels of the hydrogen atom arise naturally as standing-wave resonances in the dynamic vacuum modified by the presence of a proton. The paper suggests that the hydrogen spectrum is exactly isospectral - meaning it matches the real quantum mechanical spectrum—purely from classical wave mechanics plus the added dispersion term. This suggests quantization itself can be an emergent property of vacuum dynamics rather than an irreducible quantum rule. While the paper does not describe a working energy-harvesting device, it supplies the theoretical framework Casimir cites for why carefully engineered Casimir cavities might produce usable electrical effects by interacting with this dynamic vacuum.
If the MicroSparc performs as described and survives independent testing, the implications could be significant. Battery-free electronics would reduce electronic waste, lower costs for remote or implantable devices, and enable always-on sensors and edge-AI systems that currently drain power quickly. In space applications - where White’s background lies - persistent low-power sources could support long-duration probes or habitats without massive solar arrays or fuel. On Earth, scaling to higher outputs could address aspects of energy storage and distribution challenges.
Yet major hurdles remain. Nanofabrication at the required scale must be perfected for mass production. Long-term stability, environmental robustness, and true net energy gain (accounting for all inputs and losses) need exhaustive verification. The physics community will require reproducible, peer-reviewed measurements from multiple laboratories before accepting that usable power is being extracted from the vacuum without violating thermodynamic principles.
Casimir Inc. describes the current constraints as engineering and manufacturing maturity rather than fundamental physics. With $12 million in new capital, the company intends to iterate on chip performance, optimize materials, and prepare for 2028 commercialization in the ultra-low-power sector. White and his collaborators have spent decades bridging theoretical physics, advanced propulsion, and now applied semiconductor engineering. Whether the MicroSparc represents a genuine breakthrough in harvesting quantum vacuum energy or an incremental step that falls short of its promises will be determined by forthcoming data and scrutiny.
For now, the announcement combines substantial venture backing, a peer-reviewed theoretical foundation, and a concrete prototype timeline. It invites both excitement and careful skepticism - hallmarks of any claim that touches on one of physics’ most profound frontiers: the nature and usability of empty space itself.
Negative reactions (of course)
The Physical Review Research paper has sparked discussion in physics communities and on social platforms, with some viewing it as an intriguing reinterpretation of quantum phenomena and others calling for rigorous experimental validation.
The Debrief article notes scientific skepticism. Experts contacted by the publication declined to comment publicly on the specific device or the supporting paper, citing longstanding concerns that extracting usable energy from the quantum vacuum often conflicts with conservation laws or borders on “pseudoscience,” whatever that means.
In reply to the question “this look legit?,” popular science commentator Sabine Hossenfelder answered “no.” Then she published a video titled “Perpetual Motion Machine Raises $12M from Investors,“ with a strong condemnation of White’s claims.
Of course, skepticism is important in science and a healthy dose of skepticism is a scientific virtue. But I would argue that too much skepticism, motivated only by the scientific analogue of political correctness, is a scientific sin. This is one of the research fields whose very existence is likely to offend and anger the “scientific correctness” warriors.
Waiting for more studies and independent verification of the MicroSparc performance data, I find myself hoping that White is right. If he is right, the applications and implications of zero point energy harvested from the quantum vacuum would be huge. If not, never forget that trying hundreds of wrong ways is the price to pay to eventually find the right one, and that wildly imaginative scientific research always pays at the end. The investors seem to understand this. So, let bold explorers like White scout in peace, and eventually they’ll come back with useful and perhaps extremely useful findings.