German startup Proxima Fusion has raised a €130m Series A round — the largest funding round for a European fusion startup.
The round was co-led by Cherry Ventures and Balderton Capital, with participation from UVC Partners, Germany’s deep tech and climate tech fund (DTCF), Plural, Leitmotif, Lightspeed, Bayern Kapital, HTGF, Club degli Investitori, OMNES Capital, Elaia Partners, Visionaries Tomorrow and redalpine. It brings Proxima’s funding so far to €185m.
Munich-based Proxima was founded in 2023 as a spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP). Its team includes engineers and scientists from IPP, MIT, Harvard, SpaceX, Tesla, and McLaren.
The company plans to use the funds to build its stellarator — a powerful magnet crucial to the fusion process. The tech works by suspending magnets in hydrogen plasma, which are then heated so the atomic nuclei fuse, releasing energy which can be turned into electricity.
Following the unveiling of “the world’s first blueprint for a commercial power plant” in February, Proxima is aiming to have its magnets constructed by 2027. After that, it hopes to build a demonstration plant by 2031 — estimated to cost €1bn — and have a commercial plant up and running a decade later.
Francesco Sciortino, Proxima’s CEO, told the Financial Times he hopes a European government will help finance the cost of the demonstration plant.
No fusion machine has yet managed to produce more energy than it consumes, but investor appetite for the industry is on the up.
Earlier this year, fellow German fusion startup Marvel Fusion secured a €113m round. American fusion companies have raised significantly more: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Massachusetts-based firm backed by Bill Gates, has raised over $2bn.
This article was updated on 11th June 2025 to reflect that Visionaries Tomorrow also invested in the funding round.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/proxima-fusion-raises-130m/
