A major fusion funding round just hit Europe.
Proxima Fusion has been working on developing a stellarator, a type of magnetic confinement fusion machine, for the last two years since it spun off from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). Now, Proxima has raised a €130M ($151M) Series A round of funding to support its fusion development efforts.
- The round was led by Cherry Ventures and Balderton Capital.
- Other investors included UVC Partners, DeepTech & Climate Fonds (DTCF), Plural, Leitmotif, Lightspeed, Bayern Kapital, HTGF, Club degli Investitori, OMNES Capital, Elaia Partners, Visionaries Tomorrow, Wilbe, and redalpine.
The round makes Proxima the best-capitalized stellarator company in the world, with total fundraising coming to more than $200M. This round is also Europe’s largest private round for a fusion company to date.
“We back founders solving humanity’s hardest problems — and few are bigger than clean, limitless energy,” Filip Dames, Cherry Ventures founding partner, said in the announcement. “This is deep tech at its best, and a bold signal that Europe can lead on the world stage.”
Star power: Proxima Fusion is working on building a stellarator, a toroidal device that uses irregularly shaped superconducting magnets to confine a plasma as efficiently as possible. It’s using research that started at the IPP and creating advanced simulations as the foundation for its fusion machine design.
The team consists of more than 80 people across offices in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK.
What’s next? With this massive batch of funding, Proxima looks to move from lab-based simulations into real hardware. The company plans to demo its Stellarator Model Coil in 2027 as its first major piece of hardware. After that, it will work toward starting up Alpha, its demonstration stellarator, by 2031.
Lead Reporter of Ignition
