{"id":1574,"date":"2026-07-11T20:28:56","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T18:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/energianucleare.eu\/proxima-fusion-raises-e411-million-google-and-rwe-back-the-stellarator\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T20:28:56","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T18:28:56","slug":"proxima-fusion-raises-e411-million-google-and-rwe-back-the-stellarator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/energianucleare.eu\/en\/proxima-fusion-raises-e411-million-google-and-rwe-back-the-stellarator\/","title":{"rendered":"Proxima Fusion raises \u20ac411 million: Google and RWE back the stellarator"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Proxima Fusion<\/strong> has announced a <strong>\u20ac411 million funding round<\/strong> \u2014 approximately $468 million \u2014 bringing its valuation to \u20ac2.4 billion and making it the best-funded fusion company in Europe. The round was led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures, with strategic participation from <strong>RWE<\/strong> and <strong>Google<\/strong>. Other investors include KfW Capital, SPRIND, Balderton Capital, Cherry Ventures, and DST Global Partners, with several returning backers reaffirming their confidence in the company.<\/p>\n<p>Founded in Munich in 2023 as the first spin-out of the <strong>Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics<\/strong>, Proxima Fusion has moved fast. The team \u2014 more than 150 physicists, engineers, and operators \u2014 is led by CEO Francesco Sciortino, who previously worked at the same institute as a European coordinator for tokamak research before pivoting to stellarators following results achieved with the <strong>Wendelstein 7-X<\/strong>. The other co-founders come from MIT, Harvard, SpaceX, Tesla, and McLaren \u2014 a depth of expertise that underpins the entire venture.<\/p>\n<p>The company&#8217;s roadmap has three milestones. By 2027, Proxima will complete the <strong>Stellarator Model Coil<\/strong>, a demonstrator magnet designed to validate the use of high-temperature superconductors in stellarator magnets \u2014 a technology developed in collaboration with the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. This will be followed by construction of the <strong>Alpha<\/strong> demonstrator, scheduled to begin in early 2027, with the target of achieving net energy gain by 2031. Alpha will be built near Garching, home of the Max Planck IPP. The ultimate goal is <strong>Stellaris<\/strong>, the world&#8217;s first commercial stellarator, to be built on the site of the decommissioned Gundremmingen fission plant in Bavaria, with RWE as the industrial partner.<\/p>\n<p>The quasi-isodynamic stellarator \u2014 the type of machine Proxima is developing \u2014 has a key advantage over the tokamak design used by ITER: net toroidal currents in the plasma cancel out to zero, enabling continuous, stable operation. This makes it, at least in principle, better suited to commercial electricity generation. The <strong>Stellaris<\/strong> concept, published in a peer-reviewed paper in February 2025, has been described as the world&#8217;s first fully integrated design for a fusion power plant engineered for reliable, steady-state operation. In July 2025, the German federal government had already designated fusion as one of the country&#8217;s six critical technologies of the future, committing more than \u20ac1 billion to research through 2028.<\/p>\n<p>With this latest round, Proxima has raised over \u20ac650 million in total. Google has also chosen to invest in U.S. rival Commonwealth Fusion Systems \u2014 a signal that major tech capital now treats fusion as a real market, not a distant hypothesis. RWE, for its part, committed \u20ac25 million just months after signing the agreement to host Stellaris at Gundremmingen, turning what was a memorandum of intent into a concrete financial stake. If Alpha demonstrates net energy gain by the early 2030s, the path to Europe&#8217;s first fusion power plant will be all but set in stone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>German startup Proxima Fusion has closed a \u20ac411 million round \u2014 the largest ever in European fusion \u2014 with Google and RWE among the new strategic investors. The goal is to build the world&#8217;s first commercial stellarator plant by the end of the decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":1571,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,119],"tags":[125,131],"class_list":["post-1574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy-economics","category-fusion","tag-decarbonization","tag-energy-transition"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Proxima Fusion raises \u20ac411 million: Google and RWE back the stellarator - Energia nucleare<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Proxima Fusion raises \u20ac411M with Google and RWE backing its plan for the world&#039;s first commercial stellarator in Europe.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/energianucleare.eu\/en\/proxima-fusion-raises-e411-million-google-and-rwe-back-the-stellarator\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Proxima Fusion raises \u20ac411 million: Google and RWE back the stellarator - 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