Munich-based Proxima Fusion has raised €411mn ($468mn), the largest private fusion round Europe has ever seen and a rare vote of confidence in a technology that has yet to produce a watt of commercial power. The deal values the stellarator company at €2.4bn and brings in Google and German utility RWE as strategic backers.
XTX Ventures and East X Ventures, the venture arms of two quantitative trading firms with a growing taste for hard science, led the round. East X runs Starmaker One, Europe’s first fund dedicated to fusion and backed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority.
Returning investors Plural, Balderton, Cherry Ventures, Lightspeed and DST Global Partners piled back in, joined by newcomers KfW Capital, SPRIND and Burda Principal Investments. It comes barely a year after Proxima’s record €130mn Series A, which Cherry Ventures and Balderton co-led.
For Google, it is a first bet on a European fusion company, extending an interest that already spans a clutch of US developers, according to TechFundingNews. RWE’s stake is more concrete: the utility put in around €25mn, and months earlier it agreed to help build the first stellarator plant on the site of a decommissioned fission reactor in Gundremmingen, Bavaria.
