Venture capitalists’ appetite for fusion startups has grown and waned in recent years. For example, the Fusion Industry Association found that while nuclear fusion companies had attracted more than $6 billion in investment in 2023, $1.4 billion more than in 2022, the 27% growth proved slower than in 2022 as investors faced external fears such as inflation.
But the numbers don’t tell the full story: Business interest in the field has remained strong as startups begin to find new ways to capture the sun’s power to produce safe, unlimited energy.
The field reached a major milestone in 2022, when the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility managed to trigger a fusion reaction that produced more power than was required to ignite a fuel pellet. And then in August of last year, the team confirmed that their first test wasn’t just pure luck. The road to real fusion power remains long, but the important thing is that it is no longer theoretical.
The latest company looking to make a name for itself in the space is Proxima Fusionthe first spin-out from the established Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). Munich-based Proxima has raised 20 million euros ($21.7 million) in a seed round to begin building the first generation of fusion power plants.
The company bases its technology on “quasi-equivalence (QI) stellar” with high temperature superconductors. In plain English, an asteroid is a doughnut-shaped ring of precisely positioned magnets that can contain the plasma from which fusion energy is born. However, constellations are extremely difficult to manufacture, as they place the magnets in rather odd shapes and require extremely precise engineering.
Proxima Fusion claims to have found a way to address these issues using engineering solutions and advanced computing in 2022, and as a spin-out, the company has now relied on research from the Max Planck IPP, which built Wendelstein 7-X ( W7-X) experiment, the largest asteroid in the world.
The new approach to fusion is only possible because of the ability to use AI to simulate plasma behavior, bringing the prospect of sustainable nuclear fusion closer, Dr. Francesco Sciortino, co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, told TechCrunch. a phone call.
German startup Marvel Fusion, which has been funded by German VC Earlybird, uses laser confinement to trigger the reaction, and when I asked Sciortino why Proxima uses stellarators, he said: “With lasers, you take a small pellet and shoot it with heat. many very powerful lasers. This releases energy through fusion, but you compress something and let it explode. While what we are working on is this real limitation. So it’s not an explosion, but a steady state. is continuously in operation”.
Sciortino, who completed his doctorate at MIT on nuclear tokamak projects, said Proxima will build on what it has learned from the W7-X device, which has had more than 1 billion euros in public investment. He added that the projected timeline to get to fusion power is by the mid-2030s. “We’re looking, give or take, 15 years. Our goal is to build an intermediate device in Munich by 2031. If we can get there, then the mid-2030s is possible.”
The startup’s investors are equally convinced.
Ian Hogarth, a partner at one of Proxima’s investors, Plural, told me: “There are two big things that I think are really exciting about what Proxima is doing. First, their asteroid has benefited from two big, big trends in high-temperature superconductors and advances in computer-aided simulation of complex multiphysics systems. And secondly, the world’s most advanced asteroid in the entire world is in Northern Germany.”
He believes Proxima, as the first spin-out from this ambitious government project, will give it the edge it needs to succeed: “It’s a classic example of the ‘entrepreneurial state,’ where a startup can build on top of that incredible public investment. “
That said, Proxima isn’t the only player in the fusion race. Helion Energy raised a $500 million round two years ago, led by tech entrepreneur and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example. And there are at least 43 other companies developing nuclear fusion technologies.
Proxima’s first round was led by Redalpine, with participation from Bavarian government-backed Bayern Kapital, Germany-backed DeepTech & Climate Fonds and the Max Planck Foundation. The round was also participated by numerous and existing investors High-Tech Gründerfonds, Wilbe, UVC Partners and the Tomorrow Fund of Visionaries Club.
