Venture capitalists' appetite for merger startups has been up and down in the past few years. For example, the Nuclear Fusion Industry Association found that while nuclear fusion companies attracted more than $6 billion in investment in 2023, $1.4 billion more than in 2022, the 27% growth was slower than It was in 2022, as investors battled external concerns such as inflation.
However, the numbers don't tell the whole story: interest in projects in this area has remained strong as startups begin to find new ways to harness the sun's energy to produce safe, unlimited energy.
The field reached a milestone in 2022 when the Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility was able to induce a fusion reaction that produced more energy than was needed to ignite a fuel pellet. And then in August last year, the team confirmed that their first test was more than just good luck. The road to true nuclear fusion power is still a long way off, but the exciting thing is that it's no longer theoretical.
The latest company looking to make a name for itself in this space is Proxima Fusion, the first spin-off from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). Munich-based Proxima has raised €20 million ($21.7 million) in a seed round to start building the first generation of fusion power plants.
The company bases its technology on “quasi-isodynamic (QI) stars” with high-temperature superconductors. In plain English, a stellarator is a donut-shaped ring of precisely placed magnets that can contain the plasma from which fusion energy is generated. However, making stars is very difficult, because they place magnets in rather strange shapes, and require very precise geometry.
Proxima Fusion claims to have found a way to address these problems using both engineering and advanced computing solutions in 2022, and as a spin-off, the company has now built on research from Max Planck IPP, which built the Wendelstein 7-X. Experience (W7-X), the largest star in the world.
The new approach to fusion is only possible because of the ability to use artificial intelligence to simulate the behavior of plasma, 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 was funded by German VC firm Earlybird, uses laser containment to trigger the reaction, and when I asked Sciortino why Proxima uses a stellar, he said: “With a laser, you can take a small pellet and fire heat at it using multiple lasers.” Very powerful. This releases energy by fusion, but you compress something and let it explode. Whereas what we're working with is this actual confinement. So it's not an explosion, it's in a steady state; it's constantly running.
Sciortino, who completed his doctorate at MIT in nuclear tokamak projects, said Proxima would benefit from what was learned from the W7-X device, which had more than €1 billion in public investment. He added that the expected timetable for reaching fusion energy is the mid-2030s. “We're looking at 15 years, give or take. Our goal is to build an intermediate device in Munich probably by 2031. If we can get there, we could get to the mid-2030s.”
Investors in the startup are equally convinced.
“There are two big things that I think are really compelling about what Proxima is doing,” Ian Hogarth, a partner at Plural, one of Proxima's investors, told me. First, their stellar device capitalizes on two big, big trends in high-temperature superconductors and advances in high-temperature superconductors. In computer-aided simulation of complex, multi-physics systems.Secondly, the most advanced stars in the entire world are located in northern Germany.
He believes Proxima is the first product to emerge from this ambitious government project that will give it the edge it needs to succeed: “It's a classic example of the 'entrepreneurial case', where a startup can build on top of this amazing public investment.”
However, Proxima is not the only player in the race toward fusion. Helion Energy raised a $500 million Series E two years ago, led by tech entrepreneur and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example. There are at least 43 other companies working on developing nuclear fusion technologies.
Proxima's seed round was led by Redalpine, with participation from Bavarian government-backed Bayern Capital, German government-backed DeepTech & Climate Fonds, and the Max Planck Foundation. Several existing investors, such as High-Tech Gründerfonds, Wilbe, UVC Partners and Tomorrow Fund of Visionaries Club, also participated in the round.
