Proxima Fusion raises €411 million to build Europe’s fusion demonstrator

Proxima Fusion closed a €411 million ($468 million) Series A2 financing round on July 7, 2026, pushing its valuation to €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion) and making it Europe’s best-funded fusion company. The Munich-based stellarator developer, which also has offices in Oxford and Zurich, will use the funding to build Alpha, its net-energy stellarator demonstrator, and to expand hiring across engineering, manufacturing and operations at all three locations as part of its vertical integration strategy.

XTX Ventures and East X Ventures led the round, with RWE and Google joining as strategic investors. KfW Capital, SPRIND and Burda Principal Investments joined alongside returning investors including Plural, UVC Partners, Balderton, Cherry Ventures, DST Global Partners, Brevan Howard Macro Venture, Lightspeed, DTCF, Redalpine, Leitmotif, Elaia, CDP Venture Capital, Bayern Kapital and the EIC Fund.

German utility RWE became an investor months after signing an agreement with Proxima to build the first fusion power plant using a stellarator design on the site of a former nuclear fission plant in Gundremmingen, Bavaria. Google’s investment adds to the search giant’s existing interest in fusion as a potential source of long-term, carbon-free, dispatchable power. Proxima and its investors describe the round as one of the largest private technology investments in Europe this year, and the largest in European fusion to date.

Alpha in Munich

The financing backs construction of Alpha, Proxima’s net-energy stellarator demonstrator near Munich, developed with the state of Bavaria, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and RWE. The project is meant to validate the technologies behind Proxima’s design and precede a commercial fusion power plant later this decade.

“Europe is racing with the United States and China to get to the first fusion power plant. Proxima’s financing demonstrates that Europe can invent breakthrough technologies and build globally competitive companies around them. Investors recognize both the urgency and the opportunity of what we’re doing and are backing us to develop a generational energy technology company,” said Francesco Sciortino, Co-Founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion.

Shooting for the stars

In under three years, Proxima has secured more than €650 million ($740 million), including €95 million in public grants. It closed the €411 million round just three months after signing a memorandum of understanding with the Free State of Bavaria, RWE and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, exceeding the target of matching Bavaria’s €400 million public funding commitment to the company’s roadmap.

The new capital will be used to finish the Stellarator Model Coil, increase production of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) cable and magnets, and keep developing the engineering and manufacturing systems needed for stellarators. Proxima plans to keep hiring across engineering, manufacturing and operations to support that work.

How AM is enabling the stellarator

Proxima’s stellarators rely on external magnets to confine plasma in a three-dimensional shape, unlike tokamaks, which use a current running through the plasma itself. That geometry produces coil and support shapes that are difficult to fabricate with conventional machining, and additive manufacturing has become one of the tools Proxima uses to build them, alongside HTS magnets and machine learning-based design software. As VoxelMatters reported when Proxima raised a €130 million ($148 million) Series A round in June 2025, the company builds its designs on StarFinder, a cloud-based platform for optimizing quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarator geometries, and pairs simulation work with 3D printing for rapid prototyping.

Additive manufacturing has precedent in earlier stellarator research. Work on the UST-2 stellarator showed that polymer and composite coil frames could be 3D printed and filled with reinforcing resin to reach tolerances better than 0.3 millimeters, and tests on the EPOS stellarator coils found that 3D printed aluminum structures held positional accuracy and magnetic performance within predicted ranges. Proxima’s Stellaris power plant concept, which the company is targeting for later this decade, combines HTS magnets with a quasi-isodynamic magnetic architecture and applies 3D printing to the coil and support geometries required by that architecture.

Proxima Fusion is a spin-out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, building on the Wendelstein 7-X research program. The company employs about 200 people across engineering, science and operations, headquartered in Munich with offices in Zurich and Oxford. Its roadmap is backed by the Alpha Alliance, a consortium of more than 50 industrial partners, as well as an industrial development board.