The funding, which Proxima said is its largest ever private equity investment in European Fusion, brings the company’s value to €2.4bn.
German-based Proxima Fusion has raised 411 million euros in a funding round to help develop its hybrid energy technology.
Proxima designs and builds fusion power plants using quasi-isodynamic stellarators (QI) – machines that use magnets to close the plasma – to bring “unlimited, safe, clean energy to the grid”, according to the company.
Fusion power is a potential way to generate energy using the heat released by nuclear fusion reactions. As a potential alternative to nuclear fission, which is used by current nuclear power plants, fusion offers advantages such as high-level radioactive waste and low safety risks, although it has not yet been commercially deployed due to technical challenges.
The funding round, which was led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures with RWE and Google as strategic investors, brings the value of Proxima to €2.4bn.
Other investors who joined the round include KfW Capital, SPRIND and Burda Principal Investments, with returning investors including Plural, Balderton, EIC Fund and Lightspeed, to name a few.
According to Proxima, the funding is the largest private investment ever made in Europe.
“Europe is racing with the United States and China to be the first in power generation. Proxima’s investments show that Europe can not only invent advanced technologies, but also build globally competitive companies around it,” said Dr. Francesco Sciortino, founder and CEO of the company.
“Investors see both the urgency and opportunity of what we are doing and are supporting us to develop a manufacturing energy technology company.”
The funding will be used to build Alpha, a residual energy star detector near Munich that is targeted for the early 2030s. Proxima describes Alpha as “an important bridge between decades of integrated research and commercial deployment”.
The project – to be led by Proxima in collaboration with the state of Bavaria, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and RWE – hopes to validate key technologies and accelerate the development of the world’s first fusion power plant “later in the decade”.
The company will also use the funding to focus on the completion of the stellarator model coil, the expansion of high-temperature superconducting cable and magnet production, as well as the further development of the engineering and production systems required for the stellarators. Proxima also said it will hire across engineering, manufacturing and operations to accelerate progress.
Proxima Fusion was founded in 2023 by Sciortino, Lucio Milanese, Jorrit Lion, Martin Kubie and Jonathan Schilling, and was the first to come out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.
While headquartered in Munich, Proxima has offices in Zurich and Oxford.
Since its inception, the company – which employs around 200 people – has raised more than €650m, including €95m in government grants.
This latest round of funding comes three months after the company signed a partnership agreement with the Free State of Bavaria, RWE and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics to install the world’s first solar power plant on the grid in Europe.
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