Proxima Fusion closes €20m Seed round

20 April 2024

Proxima Fusion, the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics has closed a preempted and oversubscribed seed round raising €20m ($21.7m) from new and existing investors.  The round was led by redalpine, with participation from the Bavarian government-backed Bayern Kapital, German government-backed DeepTech & Climate Fonds (DTCF) and the Max Planck Foundation. Existing investors Plural, High-Tech Gründerfonds, Wilbe, UVC Partners, and the Tomorrow Fund of Visionaries Club also participated less than one year after investing in the company’s €7.5m pre-seed round.

This new funding supports expansion of the Proxima’s team in Munich, and its public-private partnerships in Europe, to build on existing progress towards building the first generation of fusion power plants based on quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators with high-temperature superconductors.

Proxima Fusion builds on groundbreaking results from the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) experiment, the world’s largest stellarator at the Max Planck IPP, resulting from €1.3bn of public investment by the German Government and the European Union. Ian Hogarth, Partner at Plural, commented: “W7-X is one of the technological wonders of the modern world. Proxima Fusion, originally spinning out from the organization behind it, aims to take the vision of W7-X to industrial level.”