Proxima Fusion closed a €411 million funding round on July 7, 2026, reaching a valuation of €2.4 billion and bringing total financing to over €650 million in less than three years. Days later, on July 16, Swedish company Freemelt signed a collaboration agreement with the German firm and joined the Alpha Alliance. Two separate announcements that, taken together, illustrate how rapidly the industrial ecosystem around magnetic confinement fusion is expanding across Europe.
The round was led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures. Strategic investors include RWE and Google. RWE took a stake just months after signing an agreement with Proxima to build the first commercial stellarator plant at the site of the former Gundremmingen fission nuclear power station in Bavaria, currently undergoing decommissioning. Google reaffirmed its interest in fusion as a clean, long-term baseload energy source at a time when electricity demand from AI data centers continues to climb. The round also includes €95 million in public contributions and is considered the largest ever raised by a European fusion company.
Proxima’s flagship project is Alpha, a stellarator demonstrator designed to achieve net energy gain — a Q factor greater than 1 — for the first time ever with this technology. The device will be built in Garching, near Munich, with a target operational date of 2031. Alpha is more than a test bed: it will validate the technologies, manufacturing processes, and engineering systems needed for the subsequent commercial plant, Stellaris, planned for the late 2030s at Gundremmingen. Bavaria has already committed up to €400 million in public co-funding, and the regional government is actively involved in site planning and the licensing process.
This is the context in which the Freemelt agreement takes shape. The Swedish company brings to the alliance its electron beam powder bed fusion technology — known as E-PBF — specializing in tungsten processing. Initial work will focus on the design, fabrication, and qualification of plasma-facing components: specifically the tungsten parts of Alpha’s divertor and first wall. Freemelt brings relevant credentials to the role: the company has previously collaborated with the UK Atomic Energy Authority and is currently leading a feasibility study for Fusion for Energy, the European body managing the EU’s contribution to the ITER project, to qualify tungsten as a suitable material for fusion applications. The collaboration is structured to progress through successive phases: design studies, prototyping, testing, and, looking ahead, industrialization activities.
The Alpha Alliance now counts more than 30 European and international companies. Members include Air Liquide, Eni, Siemens Energy, and Thales. The stated goal is to build a European supply chain for fusion, capable of supporting Alpha first and then large-scale commercial production. Proxima was founded as the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and builds on the research conducted at the Wendelstein 7-X reactor. Unlike a tokamak, the stellarator operates in steady-state without the instabilities associated with plasma current, making it potentially better suited to continuous operation in a commercial plant.
If Alpha meets its targets in 2031, Proxima will have demonstrated something no other stellarator has achieved: producing more energy than it consumes. At that point, the path toward Stellaris and Europe’s first grid-connected fusion power plant will rest on concrete foundations — not just financial ones. The 3D-printed tungsten components from Freemelt could be among the building blocks on which that future is constructed.
