Sam Wurzel

Sam Wurzel is the New York-based Founder of Fusion Energy Base, a platform tracking organizations and supply chains within the fusion energy sector. Previously, he co-founded Octopart, an electronic component data search engine backed by Y Combinator that served hundreds of thousands of design engineers before being acquired by Altium in 2015. From 2021 to 2024, Wurzel served as a Technology-to-Market Advisor at ARPA-E and co-led the U.S. Department of Energy's Fusion Crosscut Team to facilitate the commercialization of funded projects. He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Brown University and a master's degree in physics from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he studied experimental plasma physics before leaving his doctoral program in 2006. His career bridges early-stage technology entrepreneurship with federal energy initiatives, focusing primarily on the commercialization and infrastructure development of fusion energy systems.