Fusion power startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised $863 million from a variety of investors including Nvidia, Google, and Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
“We’re continuing our trend here of looking into the world and saying, ‘How do we advance fusion as fast as possible?’” co-founder and CEO Bob Mumgaard told TechCrunch. “This round of capital isn’t just about fusion, just generally as a concept, but it’s about how we go to make fusion into a commercial industrial endeavor.” The company has raised nearly $3 billion — the largest amount ever for any fusion startup.
Existing investors include Emerson Collective, Eni, Future Ventures, Gates Frontier, Google, Hostplus, Khosla Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Safar Partners, Eric Schmidt, Starlight Ventures, and Tiger Global.
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New investors like Brevan Howard, Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, Stanley Druckenmiller, FFA Private Bank in Dubai, Galaxy Interactive, Gigascale Capital, HOF Capital, Neva SGR, Planet First Partners, Woori Venture Partners US, and a consortium of 12 Japanese companies led by Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and Mitsubishi Corporation joined the round.
Fusion power has long been considered a nearly limitless energy source but it is only recently investors have started placing serious bets on it. In a fusion reaction, atoms are compressed and heated until they form a fourth state of matter known as plasma. On reaching a specific temperature and pressure, the atoms begin to fuse, releasing massive amounts of energy.
CFS is currently building a prototype reactor called Sparc in a Boston suburb. The company plans to get the reactor operating by next year, and hopes scientific breakeven in 2027, a milestone in which the fusion reaction produces more energy than was required to ignite it. While Sparc hasn’t been designed to sell power to the grid, it is vital for CFS.
“There are parts of the modeling and the physics that we don’t yet understand,” Saskia Mordijck, an associate professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, told TechCrunch. “It’s always an open question when you turn on a completely new device that it might go into plasma regimes we’ve never been into, that maybe we uncover things that we just did not expect.”
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If Sparc starts operating according to plan, CFS will start working on Arc, its commercial-scale power plant, in Virginia starting in 2027 or 2028.
Earlier in this year, Google announced it will buy 200 megawatts of clean fusion power produced by Arc as part of a partnership with CFS. Arc is expected to generate 400 megawatts of clean, zero-carbon power in the early 2030s, which is enough energy to power large industrial sites or roughly 150,000 homes. With this agreement, Google can also purchase power from additional Arc plants.
Mumgaard also told TechCrunch that while Sparc will help prove that the science is sound, it will do more than that for CFS. “That’s very important. But it’s also to know the capabilities that you need to be able to deliver it. It’s also to have the receipts, know what these things cost,” he said. He also added that while the latest funding round will help build Sparc, it wouldn’t be enough for Arc.
“The fact that it’s a first of a kind technology is a wrinkle that then has a big impact on where the capital will come from,” he said. “We’re not entirely sure, but we are pretty committed to doing this. And our investors are pretty committed to doing this.”