Venture capitalists' appetite for fusion startups has waxed and waned in recent years. For example, the Fusion Industry Association found that while nuclear fusion companies had attracted more than $6 billion in investment in 2023, $1.4 billion more than in 2022, the 27% growth was more slower than in 2022, as investors battled external fears such as rising inflation. .
However, the numbers don't tell the full story: corporate interest in this field has remained strong as startups begin to find novel ways to potentially capture the power of the Sun to produce safe, unlimited energy.
The field reached a major milestone in 2022 when the Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility managed to spark a fusion reaction that produced more energy than needed to ignite the fuel pellet. And then in August last year, the team confirmed that their first test wasn't just good luck. The road to true fusion power is still long, but the interesting thing is that it is no longer theoretical.
The latest company looking to make a name for itself in the space is Upcoming Fusionthe first spin-out of the acclaimed Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP). Munich-based Proxima has raised €20 million ($21.7 million) in a seed round to begin building its first generation of fusion power plants.
The company bases its technology on “quasi-isodynamics (QI) stellar”With high temperature superconductors. In simple terms, a stellarator is a doughnut-shaped ring of precisely placed magnets that can contain the plasma from which fusion energy is born. However, stellarators are extremely difficult to manufacture, as they place the magnets in quite strange shapes and require extremely precise engineering.
Proxima Fusion says it has come up with a way to address these issues using advanced engineering and computing solutions in 2022, and as a result, the company has now built on research from Max Planck's IPP, which built the Wendelstein 7-x. (W7-x), the largest stellarator in the world.
The new approach to fusion is only possible thanks to the ability to use ai to simulate the behavior of plasma, thereby bringing the prospect of viable nuclear fusion closer, Dr. Francesco Sciortino, co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, told TechCrunch. a call.
German startup Marvel Fusion, which has been funded by German VC Earlybird, uses laser containment to provoke the reaction, and when I asked Sciortino why Proxima uses stellarators, he said: “With lasers, you take a small pellet and shoot heat at it with a lot of very powerful lasers. That releases energy through fusion, but you're compressing something and letting it explode. Whereas what we're working on is that actual confinement. So it's not an explosion, but a steady state; Its operation is continuous.”
Sciortino, who completed his doctorate at MIT on tokamak nuclear projects, said Proxima will leverage learnings from the W7-x device, which has seen more than €1 billion in public investment. He added that the timeline was to be able to reach fusion energy in the mid-2030s. “We are looking at, more or less, 15 years. “Our goal is to build an intermediate device in Munich, probably by 2031. If we manage to get there, then we may reach the mid-2030s.”
The startup's investors are equally convinced.
Ian Hogarth, a partner at Plural, one of Proxima's investors, told me: “There are two big things that I think are really compelling about what Proxima is doing. First, its stellarator has benefited from two major trends in high-temperature superconductors and progress in computer-aided simulation of complex multiphysics systems. And secondly, the most advanced stellarator in the world is located in northern Germany.”
He thinks that the fact that Proxima is the first product derived from that ambitious government project will give it the advantage it needs to succeed: “It is a classic example of the 'Entrepreneurial State', where a startup can build on this incredible public investment.”
That said, Proxima is not the only player in the merger race. Helion Energy raised a $500 million Series E two years ago, led by tech entrepreneur and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example. And there are at least 43 other companies developing nuclear fusion technologies.
Proxima's seed round was led by Redalpine, with participation from Bavarian government-backed Bayern Kapital, German government-backed DeepTech & Climate Fonds, and the Max Planck Foundation. The plural and existing investors High-tech Gründerfonds, Wilbe, UVC Partners and Tomorrow of Visionaries Club also participated in the round.
