Helical Fusion has closed the second tranche of its Series B round at 3.23 billion yen, equivalent to approximately $20.6 million. The headline of the deal is the entry of Fuji Electric — a Japanese industrial giant founded in 1923 — both as an investor and as an official partner in the Helix program. The move brings direct expertise in energy conversion and power electronics into a fusion project that is still in its pre-commercial phase.
The Helix program unfolds in two distinct stages. The first is Helix HARUKA, an integrated demonstration device currently under construction through a public-private partnership involving the Japanese government, the country’s national research infrastructure, and its manufacturing sector. The second is Helix KANATA, the first full-scale fusion power plant, targeted for the 2030s. The capital raised will accelerate both phases.
The technology underpinning Helical Fusion’s approach is the helical stellarator, a configuration that differs fundamentally from the tokamak: rather than a uniform toroidal shape, the plasma is confined in a geometry that rotates and twists along its axis, eliminating some of the instabilities typical of conventional magnetic confinement devices. Helical Fusion was spun out of Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science, which has been developing this architecture since the 1950s. The practical advantage is the ability to operate in steady-state mode, without the need for an externally driven plasma current. A conceptual reactor design was published in the journal Physics of Plasmas in 2023.
Fuji Electric brings a specific industrial portfolio to the table: control and instrumentation systems, energy infrastructure, and technologies spanning nuclear applications and power electronics. These are precisely the competencies required not only to achieve fusion conditions, but to convert the resulting energy into electricity and deliver it to the grid. That is the leap that separates a scientific experiment from a working power plant, and the involvement of an industrial operator of this caliber signals that the project is entering a more concrete engineering phase.
This funding round fits into a trajectory of rapid growth for Helical Fusion. In late 2024, the company closed a Series A extension worth $5.5 million, bringing its total raised to $38 million. The new round broadens the base of Japanese industrial investors behind the Helix program, assembling the manufacturing coalition needed to move fusion from the scientific axis to that of actual electricity generation. If the roadmap holds, Helix KANATA could become one of the first commercial fusion plants to come online anywhere in the world within the next decade.
