It’s a bird, it’s a plane…it’s another high-flying batch of funding for a fusion startup!
Last week, Marvel Fusion announced that it has secured a €62.8M ($70.3M) Series B round to support development of its inertial confinement fusion approach.
- HV Capital led the round, which also included b2venture, Bayern Kapital, Deutsche Telekom, Earlybird, SPRIND, and Tengelmann Ventures.
- TechCrunch first reported the news.
Frickin’ laser beams: Most of the companies raising funds at this scale to pursue commercial fusion are developing magnetic confinement fusion, which uses superconducting magnets to keep a low-density plasma bound within a core to ignite a fusion reaction. Instead, Marvel is pursuing inertial confinement, which uses high-powered lasers firing very quickly to spark a fusion reaction.
- Inertial confinement is used by the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which achieved fusion ignition—getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than it took to start it—for the first time in 2022.
- Marvel Fusion says that by using newer, more powerful, and energy-efficient lasers, it will build off existing information on fusion to get to a commercially viable technology by the early to mid-2030s.
“Fusion has to come fast and it has to come cheap,” CEO Moritz von der Linden told TechCrunch in an interview.
The company is designing its fusion machine to use hundreds of kilojoule-class lasers that can each fire ~10x per second to start a fusion reaction in a fuel comprising hydrogen and boron. That fuel was picked with mass manufacturing in mind, the founder said, but the company is open to other fuels potentially working better in the design.
Bonus points: In addition to the funding round, the Marvel Fusion team recently announced that it will participate in the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) accelerator program. That comes with a €2.5M ($2.8M) grant for tech development and an option to kick in an additional €15M ($16.8M) in equity financing, which would count as an extension of the Series B.
The next steps: Marvel Fusion is preparing to break ground on a test facility at Colorado State University. That facility will contain two lasers that will ideally prove the company’s theoretical technology so that it can proceed toward a fusion machine design. The test building is expected to be complete by 2027.
From there, it’s all about proving the technology so Marvel Fusion can start on fusion machine design. The company aims to put 20 lasers in another test facility in 2028 or ’29, and scale up to the first fusion prototype in 2032 or ’33.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
