Munich-based start-up Proxima Fusion has raised €20m ($21.7m) in seed funding to accelerate its plans to build the first generation of fusion power plants based on quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators with high-temperature superconductors.
Proxima Fusion is the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). The start-up was founded by former scientists and engineers from the Max Planck IPP, MIT, and Google-X. The group aims to deploy a new high-performance stellarator over the coming years. Its roadmap targets a first-of-a-kind fusion power plant within the 2030s. It completed its Pre-Seed fundraising of €7m in June 2023 to support fusion power plant development based on the stellarator concept. The fundraising was co-led by Plural and UVC Partners, and joined by High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and the Wilbe Group.
The latest seed round, led by redalpine, was preempted and oversubscribed, with participation from the Bavarian government-backed Bayern Kapital, German government-backed DeepTech & Climate Fonds, and the Max Planck Foundation. Existing investors, including Plural, UVC Partners, High-Tech Gründerfonds, Wilbe, and TOMORROW of Visionaries Club doubled down on their pre-seed investments.
Although stellerators have been the subject of research for more than six decades, achieving sustained and commercially viable fusion remains a challenge. In 2022, stellarator optimisation results entirely disrupted the field, enabling Proxima Fusion to tackle these challenges with an engineering and simulation-focused approach, leveraging advanced computing. The company builds on results from the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) experiment, the world's largest stellarator at the Max Planck IPP, resulting from €1.3bn of public investment by the German Government and the European Union.
“Our first year of operation has exceeded all expectations”, said Dr Francesco Sciortino, Proxima Fusion Co-Founder & CEO. “In April 2023, we hit the ground running on both engineering optimisation and high-temperature superconducting magnets. One year later, we are leading Europe into a new phase of stellarator R&D, having made huge progress in integrated design with our StarFinder framework.” He added: “The appetite from high-calibre strategic investors validates the quality of the team we've assembled, the groundbreaking impact of what we're aiming to achieve”.
Simulation-driven engineering has always been a key feature of Proxima Fusion and now AI-enabled design has become the focus. The entire engineering programme is being structured to collect training data and enable AI across domains. “When we started Proxima Fusion, we saw the opportunity for radical automation of engineering design in QI stellarators”, commented Co-Founder Martin Kubie. “Over one year, we have gone a long way to enable that vision.” In less than 12 months, the company has grown to more than 30 employees, attracting talent from companies such as Google, Tesla, TUM, Harvard, MIT, CentraleSupélec, and EPFL.
As well as speeding up the development of key enabling technologies in both hardware and software domains, Proxima Fusion will use the seed funding to further expand the team with world-class engineers and physicists, as well as to match public funding awards.
Image: Proxima fusion team (courtesy of Proxima)
