7 million euros for Proxima Fusion

Proxima Fusion, a Max Planck spin-off focused on the development of fusion power plants, has successfully closed a €7 million pre-seed financing. The fundraising was co-led by Plural and UVC Partners and received support from HTGF and Wilbe Group.

Munich, Germany - Proxima Fusion is a start-up that emerged from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). The founders of Proxima Fusion were formerly employees at Max Planck IPP, MIT and Google-X. Their goal is to develop a powerful stellarator for energy production in the next few years. The company plans to have the first fusion power plant based on the stellarator concept built in the 2030s.

Stellarators, meanwhile, can overcome the main problems of tokamaks and be significantly advanced, improving plasma stability and achieving steady-state peak power.

Francesco Sciortino, Co-Founder & CEO Proxima Fusion

To enable fusion on Earth, plasma, a high-energy ionized matter, is confined in magnetic fields. This is done using large machines such as tokamaks and stellarators, which create a magnetic "cage" shaped like a donut. Stellarators use complex electromagnets outside the plasma, while tokamaks use simple external electromagnets combined with a large current in the plasma. The tokamak design is simpler, but the high current introduces stability problems in the plasma that do not occur with the stellarator. The possibility of using fusion as a safe, clean, and highly efficient energy source has been a stimulus for academic research for many decades.

Proxima Fusion has successfully completed an early stage (pre-seed) funding round of 7 million euros. The funds will go towards further research of the company's fusion reactors. The financing was co-led by Plural and UVC Partners and supported by High-Tech Gründerfonds and Wilbe Group. As recently as April, we reported on UVC's investment in Reverion for the power plants of the future. It should be exciting to see if new collaboration opportunities arise for Proxima Fusion along the way.

We already know that we need a smart mix of energy sources. Proxima Fusion's efforts build on Germany's massive investment in stellarators.

Benjamin Erhart, General Partner UVC

Although stellarators are more complex in design than tokamaks, they offer important advantages for a fusion power plant. They can be operated with less steady-state overhead and offer an attractive solution for controlling the heat load on material surfaces. However, earlier stellarators had some drawbacks such as poor plasma confinement performance at high temperatures, high losses of fusion products, and difficulties in accurate design. In recent years, however, many of these problems have been successfully solved.

Since its commissioning in 2015, the W7-X tokamak has caught up quickly and is now among the most advanced tokamaks to receive many resources to date. However, the triple product provides only limited information about the technical and economic feasibility of a fusion concept for a power plant. This is where the W7-X scores: In February 2023, it set a record for energy conversion, which is the total heat output multiplied by the duration of the experiment.