We’ve got what you’ve all been waiting for, folks: the first fusion megaround of 2025.
Helion announced this week that it has raised a $425M Series F round. The Washington-based fusion company, famously backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, is working to develop commercial fusion on a much shorter timeline than its competitors.
Lightspeed Venture Partners and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 participated in the round as new investors, and an unidentified university provided a significant endowment. Altman, Capricorn Investment Group, Mithril Capital, Dustin Moskovitz, and Nucor, all existing investors, also participated in this round.
- The new batch of funding bumps the company’s pre-money valuation to a dizzying $5.25B.
- Helion has now raised upwards of $1B in capital to date.
- The $425M raised this time around is smaller than the last round, a $500M Series E led by Altman in 2021.
Fast and furious: While most of its competitors are working to deliver fusion power at some point within the next decade or so (cue the age-old adage that fusion is always 30 years away), Helion is known for claiming that it will generate sellable electricity from fusion by 2028. The company has a power purchase agreement with Microsoft to show for it.
There’s hardware working toward that goal, too. Last month, Helion powered up Polaris, its seventh and newest fusion prototype. Polaris hasn’t produced electricity yet, but the company expects it to be the first fusion device to notch that milestone.
The pesky bits: The technical challenge of generating electricity from fusion is nothing to sniff at, but it’s not the only thing that could hold up the commercialization process. Helion chief exec David Kirtley told TechCrunch that his primary concern this funding round is spinning up an in-house manufacturing process for certain components—namely, capacitors and thyristors, of which a fusion machine needs thousands—to cut down on wait times for orders between machines.
- “Our goal is to go from waiting three years for a supplier to give us capacitors to us making our own capacitors but faster, so now we can make them in a year or less,” Kirtley told TechCrunch.
- The process is expected to add ~100 new jobs to the company’s workforce, which sits at ~450 now, per Reuters.
Helion is also prepping for the regulatory process that awaits at the end of the development timeline, having engaged with regulators about licensing and grid interconnection.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
