Proxima Fusion’s Series A: What does it take for first time founders to raise $150M for fusion within two years of founding?

Proxima Fusion’s Series A: What does it take for first time founders to raise $150M for fusion within two years of founding?

I’ve long argued that companies building new branches of the tech tree will substantially impact European GDP and enhance our sovereignty. Building a new branch isn’t easy. It takes incredible imagination and ambition, serious entrepreneurial and technical ability, huge volumes of capital, and the stomach to navigate uncertainty, often for very long periods of time. But, if you hold your nerve, on the other side you’ll find companies like SpaceX or TSMC and, I hope one day, Proxima Fusion.

Some context 

My interest in fusion actually started as a teenager when everything I built in SimCity would go on to become a fusion-powered metropolis. But in 2022, I developed a really strong conviction that high-field superconducting magnet technology and advanced simulation would be huge tailwinds for fusion. So I went looking for the reactor concept that could benefit the most from those advancements, and realised the incredible potential of stellarators.

I was determined to launch an effort to build a stellarator fusion champion in Europe, using Germany’s world-leading experimental device Wendelstein 7-X as a springboard. But, through a tangled set of introductions that started with Shak at Prima Materia and ended with Devika at Wilbe, I met Francesco Sciortino, Proxima Fusion’s CEO. This was before Proxima had even been incorporated. Since meeting Francesco, I’ve now invested in Proxima three times through Plural - at pre-Seed, Seed, and now at Series A. 

Founded less than two years ago, Proxima has now raised over $200m in public and private funding. Its Series A is the largest ever private investment into fusion in Europe. This kind of round is not the norm, so I thought it would be worth capturing the conditions that have enabled this moment.

Leaning in to what makes Europe special

One of the things that makes Proxima so special is this sort of prescient quality it has. It often feels like the founding team understands not just the deeply-held values that make Europe unique, but also where Europe needs to go. They have the vision to race ahead, so that when Europe really needs it, Proxima will be ready.

Proxima’s founding team spent years in academia in many of the top European and US universities. The group eventually converged around the W7-X, a true marvel of modern science and engineering. I would recommend that anyone who feels pessimistic about Europe visit the W7-X - it made my soul soar. They carry their scientific integrity forward in their commitment to peer-reviewed science and it was striking how some of the most distinguished fusion scientists in the world celebrated the scientific rigour of their power plant design. The legendary Professor Dennis Whyte said that it “invokes every engineering discipline of how you put a fusion plant together and marks the biggest development in fusion technology since the Tokamaks breakthrough a decade ago.”

Proxima also remembers Europe’s remarkable heritage in nuclear engineering. Francesco often talks of how, in barely a decade, a muscular French state managed to transition the majority of its grid to nuclear fission around the 1980s - and asks “what if we help the whole world to do the same with fusion in the 2040s?” The founders see that Europe has sacrificed energy security and envision a future where fusion fundamentally decouples energy generation from natural resources, one where energy security is no longer a matter of natural resources but of advanced technology.

Intensity

The founders have spent time at MIT and in Silicon Valley, and they understand that while Europe may have wonderful traditions to build on, winning globally also means moving much faster and learning from the best traditions of US startups. 

One of our core values at Plural is intensity, and that’s something I see across the board at Proxima. This group of founders has the total and utter determination to do whatever it takes to win. A founder will relocate to build an office in Switzerland if they realise they can develop a magnet faster there, and they’ll jump on a plane the second there is a chance to close a key hire. 

It doesn’t hurt that leading the charge is Francesco, who’s one of the most driven founders I’ve worked with, and is committed to putting fusion on the grid as fast as humanly possible. It’s extraordinary how he’s been able to pull off this extremely hard thing, with his team submitting a full design for a cutting-edge fusion reactor power plant, with peer-reviews for scientific validation, a year ahead of schedule. 

Practically every board meeting I go to has basically been the Proxima team being ahead of plan and driving super impressive progress on multiple fronts at a time. This team makes every decision today instead of pushing anything back a week. It’s a remarkable level of operational and executional focus for a group of first-time founders, most of whom never worked in a commercial environment before Proxima.

Hiring people more experienced than you 

To do something as hard as building the first fusion power plant, the founders needed to hire a team that, in crucial areas, outstrips them in experience. This is one of the reasons that Proxima has been able to make such rapid progress, and it’s been critical in raising this round. This effort stretches across every part of the business - technical to commercial. Last year they hired Robert Slade as principal magnet engineer, and Robert brought with him 30 years of experience in high temperature superconducting magnets. Baz D’Arcy joined Proxima as Chief Manufacturing Officer after a career that spanned BMW, Cambridge Medical Robotics and SpaceX, where from 2013-2020 he led the ramping up of rocket production, and by the time he departed as Senior Production Director in 2020, SpaceX had launched its hundredth mission and broken its own yearly record with twenty-six missions per year. Isabel Rueda also joined the team as head of delivery, and previously decades delivered hugely complex projects for German giants Bosch and Siemens. 

In Francesco’s words, “To break the way society works, to commit the best work of your life - you can only do it with the right people.” Plural’s been really close to this process - we supported Proxima by embedding our recruiters in the business from the start. Our team has directly helped to find and close 9 of these key hires, and our recruiters filled a further 13, meaning we’ve been involved with about a quarter of the company’s hires since inception.

Communicating science 

The other area that I see as critical to Proxima’s early success has been their communications approach. They leaned into this early on and committed to explaining clearly why fusion is important and why it’s closer than people might realise. This is an area that startups can often overlook in favour of pure building and execution, and it often comes at the cost of people knowing or caring about them when they’re ready to talk. Helping scientist founders develop this skillset is not something that happens this rapidly without intense coaching, and we’ve joined Francesco for key media briefings from the outset, working together to develop the core narrative and recruit a superstar comms leader in Maria.

Navigating the investor maze

There is a class of VC who proudly proclaims that all you need to do is pick the right company and get out of the way - they wear their passivity as a badge of honour. That might work for certain digital-only businesses or maybe for repeat founders, but for something as hard as fusion, you need people who are committed to helping you succeed against the odds. 

At Plural, we aim to pour gasoline on consequential missions and make them happen faster and more furiously. It’s for companies like Proxima that we founded Plural, and I do think that choosing former founders as your VCs who will commit hours to you every week can tilt the odds in a company’s favour. Ambition is something that evolves, and it is extremely rewarding to work with founders so hungry to find a higher gear.

I’d also like to call out Benjamin at UVC Partners who has been a terrific partner and co-investor since the early days of Proxima, providing invaluable support for the company on the ground in Munich where UVC is extremely well connected and helping Proxima build critical connections in the German ecosystem. 

Joining this round are some amazing investors - Daniel at Balderton has arguably Europe’s most impressive investment track record having invested early in both Spotify ($140b market cap) and Revolut (last valuation of $45b) but has always carried himself with great thoughtfulness and humility. Filip at Cherry Ventures and Paul at Lightspeed are both former founders who share Plural’s ambition for Europe. It’s great that a team of European founders, building on a scientific breakthrough from Europe has been able to also find top European investors for this milestone round of funding.

Skating ahead 

 And while there’s been public funding going to fusion for a while, the current geopolitical landscape means European governments are now injecting serious capital into our energy sovereignty and are trying to keep that energy clean and abundant. Friedrich Merz has unlocked half a trillion euros to fund new infrastructure and committed to building the first ever fusion power plant in Germany, where Proxima is headquartered.

It’s this feeling that Proxima is building the future that has supercharged this round. It’s a deeply inspirational company to a lot of people. If it succeeds, it will bring about true energy abundance and totally transform the geopolitics of energy, turning it from a natural resource to a technology-driven market. 

Proxima represents an incredible opportunity to decarbonise and provide a stable baseload for all the downstream energy needs the world has, starting from Europe to play a global leadership role in the energy transition. It’s a big shot, and the founders are doing absolutely everything in their power to make it happen - and that’s what underscores how they’ve pulled off this hundred-million plus Series A.

The next branch

Proxima’s timelines are long, and this is just the beginning. I fundamentally believe fusion will become one of the key tenets of European sovereignty in the next decade. This is one of our best chances to become a world leader and grow the next branch of the tech tree. If you look at the multi-trillion-dollar energy market you can easily imagine the scale of impact that we’re talking about with fusion.  

As it stands, Proxima is Europe’s best bet at a clean and abundant energy resource for the future. Its founders and team are technically brilliant and executing at extreme pace with complete devotion and determination. That’s why they’ve been able to raise an industry-beating round in Europe. If reading this excites you, please spread the word - they are hiring for many roles from magnet design, to manufacturing, AI and large scale simulation.